Food Security

Food subsidies in India: Revisiting the estimates

There is a view that the fis­cal bur­den of food sub­si­dies in India is un­sus­tain­able. Yet pop­u­lar de­bate and dis­cus­sion around the costs of these food sub­si­dies, rel­a­tive to their ben­e­fits, are mis­lead­ing for two rea­sons. First, they typ­i­cally treat re­ported bud­getary sub­sidy es­ti­mates—i.e. the fis­cal cost to the gov­ern­ment of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of food via ra­tion shops—as equiv­a­lent to “trans­fers” to ben­e­fi­cia­ries. Sec­ondly, they tend to focus ex­clu­sively on con­sumers. In doing so, they ne­glect the two-part na­ture of the food dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem, which in­cludes pay­ments to farm­ers at the time of pro­cure­ment. This paper ex­am­ines ways of mea­sur­ing the costs and value of the food sub­sidy. We pre­sent es­ti­mates that com­bine the im­plicit value of ben­e­fits to con­sumers aris­ing from the re­duced price of grain sold to con­sumers via ra­tion shops, with im­plicit ben­e­fits to farm­ers, in terms of the price dif­fer­ence be­tween what farm­ers are paid by the gov­ern­ment and what they would have ob­tained in the open mar­ket. This ap­proach shows that each rupee of the “food sub­sidy” re­ported in gov­ern­ment ac­counts rep­re­sents a trans­fer worth Rs 1.29 to con­sumers and farm­ers, on av­er­age, over the pe­riod 2001–02 to 2022–23. That is, each rupee trans­ferred to these groups is as­so­ci­ated with a cost of Rs 0.79 to the gov­ern­ment.

Scaling biofortified wheat production for agrifood and nutritional security in eastern India: Evidence from five years of multi-location field evaluations in Bihar

Cooling technologies and long-term efficiency improvement of horticulture market agents: Panel data evidence from a solar-powered cold storage intervention in Nigeria

Modern cooling technologies that use renewable energy sources have been increasingly recognized as a promising tool to address a multitude of challenges emerging in progressively complex food systems in developing countries. When provided as cold storage inside horticulture markets, cooling technologies can contribute to improved quality of products and strengthened vertical linkages. Knowledge gaps about the medium- to long-term impacts of these technologies in developing countries remain, especially in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA). This study partly fills this knowledge gap by revisiting the 2021 short-term impact evaluation study (Takeshima et al. 2023) to assess the medium- to longer term impacts of interventions in northeast Nigeria in which 7 small solar-powered cold storages were installed across 7 horticulture markets. Combinations of difference-in-difference and variants of propensity score-based methods suggest that using cold storage significantly increased horticulture sales volumes and revenues of market agents. Using cold storage also reduced the share of food loss and lengthened the products’ shelf-life while raising prices received by both market agents and farmers, which were associated with improved product quality, expanded value-adding activities by market agents, and increased use of advance payments. We find no evidence of negative spillover effects inside horticulture markets. Observed effects are driven by the technical improvements that raise the efficiency of the use of purchased raw commodities, enabled by cold storage, based on modified efficiency analyses. At the same time, the efficiency of cold storage use remains low despite some improvement over time, and scopes exist to enhance this efficiency.