Abstract
Climate change and weather shocks have multi-faceted impacts on food systems with important implications for economic policy. Combining a longitudinal household survey with high-resolution climate data, we demonstrate that both climate and weather shocks increase food insecurity; cash assistance and participation in Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme have reduced food insecurity; but food assistance has been ineffective. Importantly, households with savings, and those that stored their harvest to sell at higher prices rather than for home use, suffered less from food insecurity, yet both strategies are harder for the poorest and most food insecure households to adopt. Our paper provides micro-founded evidence needed to design policies that both improve agricultural yields in the context of a changing climate and target households’ abilities to cope with shocks that put upwards pressure on food prices.
Highlights
At a global level, economic growth has tended to be accompanied by a reduction in poverty, which in turn has long been known to have the potential to reduce food insecurity and undernutrition (Haddad et al, 2003; Strauss and Thomas, 1998)
We use a fixed-effects linear probability model (LPM) using longitudinal micro survey data from the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey (ESS) combined with high-resolution climatic data to investigate the determinants of food insecurity in Ethiopia (equation (1))
The maps in figure 2a–d reveal a country where food security is compromised across multiple dimensions, and across space and time, with households in Gambelia, Somalie, and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region (SNNP) experiencing the highest levels of food insecurity in Ethiopia
Summary
Economic growth has tended to be accompanied by a reduction in poverty, which in turn has long been known to have the potential to reduce food insecurity and undernutrition (Haddad et al, 2003; Strauss and Thomas, 1998). Improvements in food security and nutrition should contribute to economic growth. Climate change is already affecting agricultural production in complex ways and having a measurable negative impact on food security (Romanello et al, 2021), and may well be responsible, at least in part, for this new trend. Climate change is likely to make the design of effective food policies to improve food security more complicated and more important. It is timely to explore the determinants of food insecurity, and the role of food policies in reducing food insecurity, in the context of a changing climate
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