Publication: Who Wins and Who Loses from Staple Food Price Spikes?: Welfare Implications for Mozambique
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2019-06
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2019-06-12
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Changes in food prices – triggered frequently by natural disasters, macroeconomic shocks or regional market disruptions– can lead to large household welfare effects. At over 60 and 40 percent, food budget shares remain high in rural and urban Mozambique, respectively. Furthermore, nearly 70 percent of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. To determine the net impact of food price changes on consumption and poverty, we performed incidence analysis combining household and farmer survey data with disaggregated, market-level price data on major staples (maize, rice, and cassava). Overall, we find evidence for a large net negative welfare effect of price rises in rural areas, and a small, negative effect in the urban areas. For instance, A 10 percent increase in maize prices is associated with an average reduction of 1.2 percent in consumption per capita in rural areas and 0.2 percent in urban areas. Not all households are affected equally. Overall, the negative impacts are larger for the bottom half of the distribution. As a result, the sharp food price spike observed in 2016–17 may have translated into a poverty increase of 4-6 percentage points, with some of the poorest provinces bearing much of the brunt. These findings underscore the importance of improving the functioning of agricultural input and output markets, developing early food security warning systems, and increasing the availability of rapidly scalable safety nets.
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“Baez, Javier E.; Caruso, German; Pullabhotla, Hemant. 2019. Who Wins and Who Loses from Staple Food Price Spikes?: Welfare Implications for Mozambique. Poverty and Equity Notes;No. 15. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31842 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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The effects from changes in the prices of rice and cassava are lower but qualitatively equal. Overall, the negative effects are larger for the bottom half of the distribution and imply that the price spike in 2016–17 may have translated into a poverty increase of 4-6 percentage points, with some of the poorest provinces bearing much of the brunt. The results hold to changes in some of the underlying assumptions of the simulations.Publication Extreme Weather and Poverty Risk(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-03)Thanks to strong economic growth over the last two decades, poverty in Mozambique has decreased and the average household is now more likely to access basic education, health, and housing. Yet, the country is still ravaged by intense and frequent weather disasters. To determine the scale and nature of the impacts of these shocks, this paper analyzes the vulnerability of rural livelihoods across three different extreme weather events: droughts, floods and cyclones. 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Exploiting the temporal stratification of a unique nationally-representative household survey, the analysis finds evidence of large declines in real per capita food consumption and in food security (per capita calorie intake and household dietary diversity) corresponding to the price shocks. The data reveal smaller price elasticities with respect to calories than with respect to food consumption, suggesting that households trade off quality for quantity as they move toward staple foods and away from nutrient-rich foods such as meat and vegetables. In addition, there is increased demand in the face of price increases (Giffen good properties) for wheat products in urban areas. 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