Coping or hoping? Livelihood diversification and food insecurity in the COVID-19 pandemic

IF 6.8 1区经济学 Q1 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS & POLICY

Food Policy Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI:10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102819

Ann M. Furbush , Anna Josephson , Talip Kilic , Jeffrey D. Michler

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

We examine the relationship between livelihood diversification and food insecurity amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis uses household panel data from Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nigeria in which the first round was collected immediately prior to the pandemic and extends through multiple rounds of monthly data collection during the pandemic. Using this pre- and post-outbreak data, and guided by a pre-analysis plan, we estimate conditional associations between livelihood diversification and food insecurity. Our results do not support the hypothesis that livelihood diversification correlates with household resilience. Though income diversification may serve as an effective coping mechanism for small-scale shocks, we find that for a disaster on the scale of the pandemic this strategy is not effective. Policymakers looking to prepare for the increased occurrence of large-scale disasters will need to grapple with the fact that coping strategies that gave people hope in the past may fail them as they try to cope with the future.

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来源期刊

Food Policy 管理科学-农业经济与政策

CiteScore

11.40

自引率

4.60%

发文量

128

审稿时长

62 days

期刊介绍： Food Policy is a multidisciplinary journal publishing original research and novel evidence on issues in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policies for the food sector in developing, transition, and advanced economies. Our main focus is on the economic and social aspect of food policy, and we prioritize empirical studies informing international food policy debates. Provided that articles make a clear and explicit contribution to food policy debates of international interest, we consider papers from any of the social sciences. Papers from other disciplines (e.g., law) will be considered only if they provide a key policy contribution, and are written in a style which is accessible to a social science readership.