Inflation Surges, Dietary Diversity and Healthy Diets, and Coping Strategies: Evidence From Rural Türkiye

Abstract

The recent 2021/22 global surges in inflation have remained heightened in most parts of the world, resulting in additional millions of people experiencing food insecurity and malnutrition, with disproportionate effects on the world's most vulnerable people, particularly poor rural farmers. Moreover, food prices are more likely to continue to surge in the foreseeable future. This is especially true in Türkiye, where food price inflation continues to record peak values with persistent increases and widening divergence from global food price inflation. Understanding how inflation surges (food price and nonfood expenditure shocks) affect dietary diversity and the different coping strategies poor rural farm households use remains a crucial gap in the global literature. Using household-reported inflation shocks during the height of the 2021/22 inflation surge, we test whether escalating inflation surges are severely undermining farm households' intake of diverse diets and healthy foods, and how they respond to these shocks in rural Türkiye. We show that households are especially vulnerable to the inflation shocks, which negatively affect higher intake of more diverse and healthy diets, though the effect is less pronounced for households with access to government premium input support. Meanwhile, we find that households that experienced an inflation surge implemented coping strategies, which are important for smoothing their consumption of diverse foods and healthy diets. However, some of the strategies implemented are associated with less diverse food varieties and greater intake of unhealthy diets, indicating that households use both beneficial and harmful strategies. Robustness checks show that inflation shocks significantly reduced the likelihood of consuming nutrient-dense foods. The evidence underscores the significance of more diverse foods and healthy diets within the nutrition and economic development framework and provides vital information on the extent to which non-erosive adjustment strategies can help rural poor farmers cope with inflation shocks. Furthermore, interventions aimed at stabilizing inflation surges are crucial for mitigating the adverse effects of shocks on the nutrition of poor rural farm households.