Wheat Flour Price Shocks and Household Food Security in Afghanistan

Anna D'Souza ()

No 262238, Economic Research Report from United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service

Abstract: To investigate the impact of rising staple food prices on household food security, we use a unique nationally representative household survey from Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest, most food-insecure countries. The econometric framework allows us to control for household, district, and province factors to isolate the effects of the 2008 sudden rise in wheat flour prices on several measures of household well-being related to food security. The results show large declines in food consumption and dietary diversity, but smaller declines in calories consumed. The evidence suggests that households choose to trade off quality for quantity, as they moved toward staple foods and away from micronutrient-rich foods, such as meat and vegetables. Additionally, for urban areas, the evidence suggests that wheat is a Giffen good; that is, as the price of wheat flour increases, demand for wheat products also increases. These findings may provide useful information for domestic and international policymakers and development agencies as they continue to confront the challenges of improving food security in this conflict-affected country.

Keywords: Demand and Price Analysis; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety; Food Security and Poverty; International Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35
Date: 2011-07-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/262238/files/6831_err121.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/262238/files/6831_err121.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

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:ags:uersrr:262238

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.262238

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Research Report from United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().