Eighth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Several studies find that in response to negative income and price shocks, households sacrifice diet quality and relatively expensive forms of calories to better maintain total calorie consumption. There is, however, little evidence on how the decline in diet quality is distributed across individual household members. We investigate how intra-household distributions of calories and nutrients respond to negative shocks using representative rural panel data from the 2011-12 and 2015 Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey. The data include individual-level dietary intake and household-level shocks (e.g., death of main earner, loss of assets, etc.) for over 5,000 households. We use a household fixed effects model to account for unobserved heterogeneity. Preliminary results suggest that negative shocks may disproportionately affect some members. The results have implications for the design of food and nutrition programs (e.g., nutritional safety nets that more explicitly account for gender dynamics). Given the growing recognition of the importance of measuring food and nutrition security at the individual level and the strong emphasis on gender equality in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we believe that knowing who is most affected when impoverished households cope with shocks is critical to tackling the first two SDGs of poverty and hunger.