Assessing Food Poverty, Vulnerability and Food Consumption Inequality in the Context of COVID-19: A Case of Bangladesh

15, December 2020 | Bangladesh

Authors:

Abstract

There is no denying the fact that, for a developing country like Bangladesh, the eco- nomic consequences of lockdown for containing COVID-19 pandemic can be far reach- ing afecting livelihoods of millions of households. Given that the share of food consump- tion expenditure to total expenditure is higher in the lower income groups of Bangladesh, this shock is expected to directly afect afordability of consumption of basic food items of these households. Using nationally representative household survey data of Bangladesh, and while following the Feasible Generalized Least Square method, this paper attempts to examine food poverty, food consumption inequality along with vulnerability to food poverty of households and explores the importance of diferent socio-demographic and environmental factors in this connection. Our estimation refects that, greater percentage of households with young children or with elderly people are found to sufer high food vulnerability. In addition, households in environmentally endangered regions e.g. drought prone areas or river erosion afected places are more food vulnerable than those in other parts of the country. Certain occupation groups e.g. day labourer and self-employed are found to be highly vulnerable to food poverty while according to our decomposition analy- sis of food consumption inequality, area of residence (urban vs. rural) is expected to cause sizable inequality in food consumption. This study can therefore, help in identifying food vulnerable households for government’s social protection programs and COVID-19 incen- tive packages, and thereby can contribute towards designing efective poverty reduction strategies.