Food Security and Wheat Prices in
Afghanistan : A Distribution-sensitive Analysis of
Household-level Impacts

This paper investigates the impact of
increases in wheat flour prices on household food security
using unique nationally-representative data collected in
Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. It uses a new estimator, the
Unconditional Quantile Regression estimator, based on
influence functions, to examine the marginal effects of
price increases at different locations on the distributions
of several food security measures. The estimates reveal that
the negative marginal effect of a price increase on food
consumption is two and a half times larger for households
that can afford to cut the value of food consumption (75th
quantile) than for households at the bottom (25th quantile)
of the food-consumption distribution. Similarly, households
with diets high in calories reduce intake substantially, but
those at the bottom of the calorie distribution (25th
quantile) make very small changes in intake as a result of
the price increases. In contrast, households at the bottom
of the dietary diversity distribution make the largest
adjustments in the quality of their diets, since such
households often live at subsistence levels and cannot make
large cuts in caloric intake without suffering serious
health consequences. These results provide empirical
evidence that when faced with staple-food price increases,
food-insecure households sacrifice quality (diversity) in
order to protect calories. The large differences in
behavioral responses of households that lie at the top and
bottom of these distributions suggest that policy analyses
relying solely on ordinary least squares estimates may be misleading.