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High Food Prices

♀. ♂. High Food Prices. Feminization and Gender Differentiated Effects by: Gustavo Anríquez Agricultural Development Economics Division FAO. Outline. Feminization: Is it a growing phenomenon? Gender and poverty, a review of the available evidence.

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High Food Prices

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  1. ♀ ♂ High Food Prices Feminization and Gender Differentiated Effects by: Gustavo Anríquez Agricultural Development Economics Division FAO

  2. Outline • Feminization: Is it a growing phenomenon? • Gender and poverty, a review of the available evidence. • The gender differentiated effects of high food prices.

  3. Feminization: Individuals

  4. Feminization: Households

  5. Gender and Poverty: Why the Bias • FHH are expected to be poorer because: • lower earnings for the “bread earner” and exclusion from higher paying jobs. • higher dependency ratios for the household. • Women take lower paying jobs to accommodate to the time constraints given by household duties. • Women sometimes face obstacles in the accumulation of assets like land and education • Women overall could be poorer: • lower participation in labor markets • lower earnings • different demographic composition of households

  6. Hypothesis: FHH are over-represented among the poorest

  7. Hypothesis 2: Women are over-represented among the poorest.

  8. Poverty and Gender • The evidence paints a nuanced picture. Neither FHH nor women are more likely to be poorer than MHH or males. • Rural FHH appear to fare worse. • Since it is not always the case, the goal is to understand when FHH and females are poorer and why. • Poverty is not the “holy grail” of gender inequality indicators.

  9. Gender and High Food Prices • In the short-run the increase in the price of food item (i) can be shown to have an effect in welfare: • ∆W = pi Qi – pi qi (Qi = production and qi = consumption) • Net Seller / Net Buyer. • At FAO we simulated a 10% increase in the price of the main food staples.

  10. Welfare Effects of Price Changes

  11. Welfare Effects of Price Changes

  12. Welfare Effects of Price ChangesDifferences by Gender

  13. Why are FHH more affected • FHH are more negatively affected from rising food prices because of two main reasons: • From the consumption side FHH for equivalent income levels tend to consume more food. • From the production side: FHH face numerous obstacles to produce at similar levels than MHH.

  14. Gender Bias in the Access to Ag. Land

  15. Conclusions • Production constraints faced by FHH not only increase current welfare costs of spiking food prices; but also hinder the ability of FHH of participating in the benefits of any supply response from the agricultural sector. • We need to better understand the link between gender and poverty, why conventional wisdom doesn’t always hold. • The heterogeneous distribution of the gender imbalance both at the individual and household level call for care when making generalizations, be it descriptive or policy advice.

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