Food Prices and Poverty: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom

The impact of food price changes depend on the income sources of households and the second order responses of consumers and producers. This book tries to generate new information derived from household data on the income sources, behavior of food prices, and case studies on the impacts of food price changes on poor households and countries. The authors show that international price increases were not passed on to domestic food prices and international prices have been high only for 10 of the last 60 years. Food sales constitute one of the biggest cash incomes for poor rural households, and agricultural households, however defined, are much poorer than non agricultural ones. Net food sellers are also poorer than net food buyers so lower prices help richer net buyers and hurt the poorer net sellers. Impact of high food prices on the imports of poorer developing countries is very small, less than 1 percent of GDP.

Case studies on the impact of price changes show that poor households can gain in Vietnam with price increases and with price decreases in Bangladesh. They also show that households can change their net buying or selling status so the estimates based on one period household data can be very misleading. All these results suggest that increases in food prices might be good fro the rural areas and for the poor which are predominantly located in these areas.

• Trusting Trade and the Private Sector for Food Security in Southeast Asia (English, Paperback)