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Food Security: Consumer Side

Explore the complexities of measuring food security, understanding calorie thresholds, and behavioral indicators for undernutrition. Discover factors influencing household resilience and unintended policy effects.

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Food Security: Consumer Side

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  1. Food Security: Consumer Side Feb 10, 2015

  2. What is Food Security? • Availability (2) Access (3) Use (Nutrition)

  3. Food security Objective in and of itself Also as an indicator of consumer vulnerability • Household welfare • Child welfare • Resilience

  4. How do we measure food security? Calories, Nutrition and Well-being • The FAO, WHO and UN estimate the prevalence of undernutrition based on comparing energy intake with energy requirements (often 1800 or 2100 Cal/person/day): “undernutrition … is defined as describing the extent to which people have dietary intakes below certain minimum requirement levels, i.e., that level of energy intake which will balance energy expenditure when the individual has a body size and composition and level of physical activity consistent with long-term good health, and which will allow for the maintenance of economically necessary and socially desirable physical activity.” (FAO/WHO/UNU) • MDG defines “hunger” as failing to reach a calorie threshold (e.g., 1800 or 2100). • Poverty lines are often derived as money needed to reach cal. threshold. (Malnutrition usually refers to lack of specific micronutrients while undernutrition refers to insufficient energy content.)

  5. Problems with calories & thresholds • No consensus on what the right operational definition of hunger is, what the right threshold is, how it should be computed. • “Correct” threshold varies across individuals. • Age, sex, height, weight, health status, physical activity, lean and muscle mass, fitness level, stress level, basal metabolic rate, etc. • Many of these can’t be observed or only at great cost. • Svedberg (2000): “It is universally agreed that standardized calorie norms cannot be used to identify undernutrition in the individual person.” • Even if intake can be measured, we’re really interested in absorption. Can we really ever hope to operationalize the calorie threshold at the individual level?

  6. Jensen and Miller approach: use behavior to reveal subsistence Bennett’s Law: The proportion of calories from starchy staples declines as income rises. • Idea: A person is undernourished when he/she behaves as if he/she is undernourished. • When a person is not consuming enough calories, they suffer significant disutility and will prioritize increasing caloric intake over other goals such as the taste and/or variety of the foods they eat, non-food consumption, etc. • At low income levels, the way to increase calories without spending more money is to substitute toward the cheapest source of calories available. • In most traditional diets, this is a staple good such as rice, wheat or cassava (i.e., grains or roots/tubers). • We identify a person as undernourished when they receive a sufficiently large share of their calories from the staple (SCS). Bennett’s Law at an individual level

  7. What influences food security? • Availability & Access (physical, social, economic) • Physical: natural environment, technology • Social: institutions, social norms, • Economic: income, price, economic institutions (market access), information, incentives • Policy

  8. (a few) broad questions* How does setting influence household food security? • Food geography not just price (variety and quality) (US: Jerch, Baylis and Dissanyake 2015; Fan et al. 2015; Canada:Dhar and Baylis) • Women’s empowerment and child food intake (India: Kandpal, Baylis and Arends-Kuenning 2014; Kandpal and Baylis 2015) What are the (unintended) effects of food security policy? (India: Baylis, Jolejole-Foreman and Mallory 2014; China: Baylis, Fan and Nogueira 2014) What affects household food security resilience? • Interaction of market access, credit, storage in India on farm household food security and household resilience. • Irrigation *shameless self-promotion portion of the talk

  9. (a few) broad questions How does setting influence household food security? • Food geography (US: Jerch, Baylis and Dissanyake 2015; Fan et al. 2015; Canada:Dhar and Baylis) Need to disentangle preferences from locational access Not just price or physical access – variety and quality (India: Kandpal, Baylis and Arends-Kuenning 2014; Kandpal and Bamore test in white ylis 2015) What affects household food security resilience? • Interaction of market access, credit, storage in India on farm household food security and household resilience. • Irrigation

  10. (a few) broad questions How does setting influence household food security? • Food geography not just price (variety and quality) (US: Jerch, Baylis and Dissanyake 2015; Fan et al. 2015; Canada:Dhar and Baylis) • Women’s empowerment and child food intake (India: Kandpal, Baylis and Arends-Kuenning 2014; Kandpal and Baylis 2015) What are the (unintended) effects of food security policy? (India: Baylis, Jolejole-Foreman and Mallory 2014; China: Baylis, Fan and Nogueira 2014) What affects household food security resilience? • Interaction of market access, credit, storage in India on farm household food security and household resilience. • Irrigation

  11. (a few) broad questions How does setting influence household food security? • Food geography not just price (variety and quality) (US: Jerch, Baylis and Dissanyake 2015; Fan et al. 2015; Canada:Dhar and Baylis) • Women’s empowerment and child food intake (India: Kandpal, Baylis and Arends-Kuenning 2014; Kandpal and Baylis 2015) What are the (unintended) effects of food security policy? (India: Baylis, Jolejole-Foreman and Mallory 2014; China: Baylis, Fan and Nogueira 2014; work by Craig Gundersen, Hope Michelson, Alex Winter-Nelson) What affects household food security resilience? • Interaction of market access, credit, storage in India on farm household food security and household resilience. • Irrigation

  12. (a few) broad questions How does setting influence household food security? • Food geography not just price (variety and quality) (US: Jerch, Baylis and Dissanyake 2015; Fan et al. 2015; Canada:Dhar and Baylis) • Women’s empowerment and child food intake (India: Kandpal, Baylis and Arends-Kuenning 2014; Kandpal and Baylis 2015) What are the (unintended) effects of food security policy? (India: Baylis, Jolejole-Foreman and Mallory 2014; China: Baylis, Fan and Nogueira 2014; work by Craig Gundersen, Hope Michelson, Alex Winter-Nelson) What affects household food security resilience? • Interaction of market access, credit, storage in India on farm household food security and household resilience. • Micro (protective) Irrigation

  13. (a few) broad questions How does setting influence household food security? • Food geography not just price (variety and quality) (US: Jerch, Baylis and Dissanyake 2015; Fan et al. 2015; Canada:Dhar and Baylis) • Women’s empowerment and child food intake (India: Kandpal, Baylis and Arends-Kuenning 2014; Kandpal and Baylis 2015) What are the (unintended) effects of food security policy? (India: Baylis, Jolejole-Foreman and Mallory 2014; China: Baylis, Fan and Nogueira 2014) What affects household food security resilience? • Interaction of market access, credit, storage in India on farm household food security and household resilience. • Micro (protective) Irrigation

  14. (a few) broad questions How does setting influence household food security? • Food geography not just price (variety and quality) (US: Jerch, Baylis and Dissanyake 2015; Fan et al. 2015; Canada:Dhar and Baylis) • Women’s empowerment and child food intake (India: Kandpal, Baylis and Arends-Kuenning 2014; Kandpal and Baylis 2015) What are the (unintended) effects of food security policy? (India: Baylis, Jolejole-Foreman and Mallory 2014; China: Baylis, Fan and Nogueira 2014) What affects household food security resilience? • Interaction of market access, credit, storage in India on farm household food security and household resilience. • Irrigation

  15. Women’s empowerment, peer effects and child food intake What do we ask? Why do we care? • Do peer networks affect household decision making as captured by female mobility, outside employment and child food intake? • What are the potential mechanisms through which peer effects work? • High degree of child malnutrition in India • Evidence that empowered women feed their children more • Female bargaining power and other social norms are hard to change • Not merely related to incomeor education

  16. What do we do? • Survey 487 women in 69 villages in India • Use participation in a women’s empowerment program to identify a shock to empowerment • Look at effect of peer empowerment on outcomes • Worry about identification in the presence of reflection, endogenous peer group formation and endogenous participation • Identify causal peer effects • Explore potential mechanisms: information, influence and identity

  17. Take home message • Participants tend to feed their children more (controlling for household income, wealth, village food access…) • Evidence of peer effects on non-participants who feed their children more dal • Evidence that peer effects encourage women to feed their daughters relatively more

  18. Up next… • Food security, storage, credit and market access • Household resilience and consumption smoothing IFSI ADM Institute for the Prevention of Post-Harvest Loss

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