Impact of Weather Shocks on Food Security: How Effective are Forests as Natural Insurance?

Abstract

Malnutrition and food insecurity affect nearly one billion people worldwide. In developing countries, adverse weather shocks exacerbate these challenges by reducing agricultural productivity. Rural households often rely on forests for food. We determine whether forest access is associated with a less severe effect of adverse weather shocks on food security in rural Malawi. Exploiting exogenous variation in weather shocks and predetermined forest access, we find that households without forest access experience drops in food security when confronted with shocks, while forest access is associated with insignificant changes in food security. This suggests that forests are used as natural insurance. For the period considered by the study, we find that most of the negative impact of shocks was driven by floods, which were more prevalent and severe than droughts. In addition, we find evidence that the role of forests as natural insurance improves with increased forest density (canopy cover). There is a minimum forest density threshold below which forests are not associated with natural insurance. These results suggest that efforts to protect forests should consider their natural insurance role, particularly in regions with weak social safety nets.

Keywords:

• Natural insurance
• forests
• food security
• NTFPs
• weather shocks

JEL Classification:

• C33 Q
• 23 Q54

Acknowledgements

Kelvin Mulungu gratefully acknowledges the financial support for this research by the following organisations and agencies: the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida); the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC); the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR); the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia; and the Government of the Republic of Kenya. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the donors.

Data availability statement

Data used in this study are available from the authors upon request.

Notes

1 In Malawi, there is negligible rainfall in the non-growing months. Second, if there is any rainfall in the preceding non-growing months, annual rainfall has an advantage as it would capture any cumulative rainfall from these months. For example, if it rained in October before the start of the season in November, cumulative total rainfall would be higher by November, which would be reflected in annual rainfall.

2 See https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/AbouttheData/DroughtClassification.aspx.

3 Results using a linear OLS model are similar to FEP.

4 Even without explicitly stated access to common property forests within a village, households could still allocate labor to forests such as private forests, or forests in other villages.

5 See https://reliefweb.int/disaster/fl-2012-000210-mwi.

6 See https://www.csis.org/analysis/drought-ravaged-malawi-faces-largest-humanitarian-emergency-its-history.

7 Results estimated with a sample excluding the villages that change status within the period are similar to the results estimated with these villages included and categorized as having access if they had access in one of the years.