“The Coronavirus Pandemic and Food Security: Evidence from Mali”—Forthcoming

My paper, co-authored with Guigonan Serge Adjognon and Aly Sanoh, on changes in experienced food security associated with the coronavirus pandemic is now forthcoming at Food Policy. In the paper, we combine pre-pandemic survey data with follow-up phone survey data from Mali, and find some interesting—and perhaps surprising—patterns in experienced food security within Mali. Here is the abstract:

This paper documents some of the first estimates of changes in experienced food insecurity associated with the coronavirus pandemic in a low-income country. It combines nationally representative pre-pandemic household survey data with follow-up phone survey data from Mali and examines sub-national variation in the intensity of pandemic-related disruptions between urban and rural areas. Although rural households are more likely to experience food insecurity prior to the pandemic, we find that food insecurity increased more in urban areas than in rural areas. Just three months after the onset of the pandemic, the rural-urban gap in experienced food insecurity completely vanished. These findings highlight that understanding effect heterogeneity is critically important to effectively designing and targeting post-pandemic humanitarian assistance.

This paper joins a host of other papers, focusing on different contests, that also examine changes in food security associated with the coronavirus pandemic. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

• COVID-19 and food security in Ethiopia: Do social protection programs protect? by Abay, Berhane, Hoddinott, and Tafere.
• Did COVID-19 Market Disruptions Disrupt Food Security? Evidence from Households in Rural Liberia and Malawi by Aggarwall, Jeong, Kumar, Park, Robinson, and Spearot.
• Impacts of COVID-19 on food security: Panel data evidence from Nigeria by Amare, Abay, Tiberti, and Chamberlin.
• Impacts of a national lockdown on smallholder farmers’ income and food security: Empirical evidence from two states in India by Ceballos, Kannan, and Kramer.
• COVID-19 implications on household income and food security in Kenya and Uganda: Findings from a rapid assessment by Kansiimi, Tambo, Mugambi, Bundi, Kara, and Owuor.
• Household response to an extreme shock: Evidence on the immediate impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on economic outcomes and well-being in rural Uganda by Mahmud and Riley.
• Food Consumption and Food Security during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Addis Ababa by Hirvonen, de Brauw, and Abate.