Rising Food Prices in Sub-Saharan Africa: Poverty Impact and Policy Responses
268 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The increase in food prices represents a major crisis for the world's poor. This paper aims to review the evidence on the potential impact of higher food prices on poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, and examines the extent to which policy responses will benefit the poor. The paper shows that rising food prices are likely to lead to higher poverty in sub-Saharan Africa as the negative impact on net poor consumers outweighs the benefits to poor producers. A recent survey shows that the most common policy response in sub-Saharan African countries is reducing taxes on food while outside the region price controls or targeted consumer subsidies are the most popular measure. Sub-Saharan African countries also have a higher prevalence of food-based safety net programs which are being scaled up to respond to rising prices. The review suggests that the benefits from reducing import tariffs on staples may accrue largely to the non-poor. Social protection programs show more promise, but geographic targeting is likely to be crucial in ensuring that benefits reach the neediest. The paper also argues that anti-poverty interventions ought to retain their focus on rural areas where poverty remains highest even after taking into account the adverse impact on the urban poor due to the rise in food prices.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4fd7ea48b3c7442843fa1ca8523015c0a80691f
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Citations in the corpus
- What’s Driving Food Prices in 2011? (2011, background): “e World Bank (2007), through its World Development Report published in 2007, had launched an effort to increase attention to agricultural development before the food crisis was apparent.”
- Potential Impact of Higher Food Prices on Poverty: Summary Estimates for a Dozen West and Central African Countries (2008, background): “The issue of the increase in food prices has received renewed attention in recent months as the increase in prices worldwide has had large negative impacts on households (e.g., Ivanic and Martin, 2007; World Bank, 2008a and 2008b; IMF, 2008; Wodon and Zaman, 2008).”
- Agriculture and Development: A Brief Review of the Literature (2011, unknown): “Bangladesh, for example, recently extended its work-for-food program in response to natural disasters and higher food prices (Coady et al., 2003).”
- Recent Global Food Price Shocks: Causes, Consequences and Lessons for African Governments and Donors (2011, background): “When domestic market oriented support comes on top of trade measures (i.e. consumer subsidies, released stocks or reduced domestic taxes), especially when poorly targeted, it increases costs even further (Wodon and Zaman, 2008).”
- Inflation dynamics and food prices in Ethiopia (2013, background): “High commodity prices, particularly for food, also have adverse effects on poverty in countries with large fractions of net foodbuyers (Wodon and Zaman, 2010).”