Drivers and stressors of resilience to food insecurity: evidence from 35 countries

The recent COVID-19 global pandemic has revealed that despite numerous development efforts, there are still inefficiencies in maintaining the living standards of people when shocks and stressors occur. While addressing issues arising from the pandemic is dramatically urgent, this should not come at the cost of averting resources and efforts from sustainable and equal growth and prosperity goals. The importance of resilience for the humanitarian and development nexus, has probed United Nations agencies, international organizations, donors, and governments to investigate key facts and determinants of this capacity. After approximately 15 years of empirical evidence, few research questions remain unexplored and unanswered. Are there few and consistently relevant elements that determine resilience capacity? What shocks are most dramatically reducing resilience? What coping strategies are most frequently adopted in the presence of shocks? This paper attempts to respond to these questions by pooling together a unique database of 35 countries. This study combines the most recent FAO-RIMA (Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis) datasets with a large set of data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) produced by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF). The analysis covers the period between 2014 and 2020 by investigating 50,622 households. The size of the sample provides our findings with great statistical power, therefore adding external validity. Our results show that firstly, diversification of income sources, education, access to land, livestock, and agricultural inputs, are the main drivers of households’ resilience capacity. Secondly, we gather evidence that the prevailing shocks are natural, health, and livelihood. Thirdly, we find that reducing the quantity and quality of food consumed, seeking an extra job, selling assets, taking credit, relying on relatives and social networks are the most adopted coping strategies. Finally, we found evidence of how mitigating strategies are adapted to the shocks: for instance, increasing working hours is adopted when a natural shock occurs while accessing credit is chosen when health shocks occur. Our results show that adequate investments in resilience are conditional to a) engaging with activities that are broadly consistent across countries and b) fine-tuning the interventions based on context specificity.