Rising food prices and undernourishment: A cross-country inquiry

Gustavo Anríquez, Silvio Daidone and Erdgin Mane

No 289022, ESA Working Papers from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Agricultural Development Economics Division (ESA)

Abstract: Households' welfare in developing countries has been hit by dramatic food prices increases which occurred between 2005 and 2008. In this paper, we adopt a partial equilibrium approach to analyze the short-time effects of a staple food price increase on nutritional attainments, as a measure of welfare. The analysis consists of first approximating complete food-demand systems and then performing household level micro-simulations. Instead of focusing on a single country profile, we provide a more complete snapshot, by comparing the evidence through a cross-country assessment made possible by use of nationally representative household surveys. Comparability is assured by the adoption of the same methodological choices in the treatment of the micro data. We find that food price increase not only reduces the mean consumption of dietary energy, but also worsen the distribution of food calories further deteriorating the nutritional status of populations. We also discovered that access to agricultural land, plays a big role in assuring adequate nutritional attainments in rural areas, and surprisingly, even in urban areas.

Keywords: Food Security and Poverty; Agricultural Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Journal Article: Rising food prices and undernourishment: A cross-country inquiry (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:faoaes:289022

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.289022

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