Do agri-food market incentives improve food security and nutrition indicators? a microsimulation evaluation for Kenya

Maria Ramos, Estefanía Custodio, Sofía Jiménez, Alfredo Mainar, Pierre Boulanger and Emanuele Ferrari
Additional contact information
Estefanía Custodio: European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)
Sofía Jiménez: Universidad de Zaragoza
Pierre Boulanger: European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)

Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, 2022, vol. 14, issue 1, No 14, 209-227

Abstract: Abstract The sustainable development goal #2 aims at ending hunger and malnutrition by 2030. Given the numbers of food insecure and malnourished people on the rise, the heterogeneity of nutritional statuses and needs, and the even worse context of COVID-19 pandemic, this has become an urgent challenge for food-related policies. This paper provides a comprehensive microsimulation approach to evaluate economic policies on food access, sufficiency (energy) and adequacy (protein, fat, carbohydrate) at household level. The improvement in market access conditions in Kenya is simulated as an application case of this method, using original insights from households’ surveys and biochemical and nutritional information by food item. Simulation’s results suggest that improving market access increases food purchasing power overall the country, with a pro-poor impact in rural areas. The daily energy consumption per capita and macronutrients intakes per capita increase at the national level, being the households with at least one stunted child under 5 years old, and poor households living areas outside Mombasa and Nairobi, those which benefit the most. The developed method and its Kenya's application contribute to the discussion on how to evaluate nutrition-sensitive policies, and how to cover most households suffering food insecurity and nutrition deficiencies in any given country.

Keywords: Food security; Nutrition; Household survey; Microsimulations; Market access; Kenya; Africa; C14; C83; I38; Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12571-021-01215-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ssefpa:v:14:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s12571-021-01215-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ulture/journal/12571

DOI: 10.1007/s12571-021-01215-2

Access Statistics for this article

Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food is currently edited by R.N. Strange

More articles in Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food from Springer, The International Society for Plant Pathology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().