Food insecurity and poverty: a cross-country analysis using national household survey data

While the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight eradicating poverty and achieving food security as two specific objectives (SDGs 1 and 2), interventions aiming to address one or the other goal are often similar in policy orientation and design. Thus, understanding better the relationship between poverty and food insecurity is of great importance to policymakers. The recent diffusion of experience-based food security scales has stimulated research on this relationship at the household level. Nevertheless, most of this literature has not relied on a rigorous measure of poverty, nor has assessed how the poverty-food insecurity relationship can be different among population subgroups such as rural and urban people. Using national household surveys from ten countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America the authors will present the main results and policy implications on the household-level relationship between monetary poverty and food insecurity.

SPEAKERS:

Ana Paula de la O Campos is an economist from the Agrifood Economics and Policy Division (ESA), Lead of Area 3 of SMART (Sustainable Markets, Agribusiness and Rural Transformation Team).

Lorenzo Moncada is a data analyst at WFP’s Research, Assessment and Monitoring (RAM) Division