Lukas Kornher

University of Bonn

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Joachim von Braun

University of Bonn

Matthias Kalkuhl

Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change

Henry Kankwamba

University of Bonn

Nicolas Gerber

University of Bonn

Isaac Bonuedi

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

Md. Fuad Hassan

Bangladesh Agricultural University

Irfan Mujahid

University of Bonn

Oliver K. Kirui

International Food Policy Research Institute

Pallavi Rajkhowa

University of Bonn

Shaibu Mellon Bedi

University of Bonn

Cooperative Institutions

University of Bonn

John Wiley & Sons (United States)

Liechtenstein Institute

Hudson Institute

International Food Policy Research Institute

Kiel University

University for Development Studies

University of Göttingen

University of Ghana

Makerere University

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Combined Effects of Weather and Health Shocks on Consumption in Rural Uganda

Research Square (Research Square) (2025)

Emily Injete Amondo Lukas Kornher Rosemary Isoto Alisher Mirzabaev Bernard Bashaasha

Abstract Background Compound and cascading shocks are common in rural areas and pose significant threats to food security and household welfare. While the importance of these combined shocks for rural communities is gaining attention, there is still very limited empirical research on the topic. This paper aims to assess the combined effects of weather and health shocks on the food, non-food, and total consumption of rural households in Uganda. Our analysis uses customized high-frequency panel household survey data collected across six waves, employing fixed effects quantile regression methods. Results The findings indicate that a short-term increase in temperature leads to a reduction in total consumption by 12–16%, with a more pronounced lagging effect on food consumption, which can be as high as 30%. Similarly, excessive rainfall adversely affects food consumption and diet diversity. The combined effects of health and weather shocks on consumption are negative and significant for lagged interaction terms, exhibiting varied effects across different household categories. Notably, the poorest quartile experiences the most substantial negative effects. Additionally, the findings reveal considerable consumption mobility among rural households over a 12-month period. Even households in the richest quartile may find themselves in the lowest consumption categories at certain times of the year. To manage these fluctuations in consumption, the poorest quartiles tend to rely on group networks and loans, while wealthier quartiles more frequently utilize remittances. Conclusion and policy implications Recognizing Uganda's vulnerability to extreme weather events and epidemics, this paper suggests key policy measures. Enhancing social protection through access to credit, social networks, safety nets, and health insurance can help households cope with climate challenges. These strategies will strengthen food system resilience and promote sustainable development.

Consumption

10.21203/rs.3.rs-5820565/v1

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Making Cash Crop Value Chains Nutrition-Sensitive: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Rural Sierra Leone

SSRN Electronic Journal (2020)

Isaac Bonuedi Lukas Kornher Nicolas Gerber

With a strong global commitment to ending food insecurity and malnutrition, policymakers are increasingly grappling with how to make smallholder agriculture nutrition-sensitive. While the need to address these problems on multiple fronts is widely recognized, there is limited evidence on the nutritional impacts of integrated interventions in export-oriented sectors in developing countries. This paper aims to bridge this gap by evaluating the nutritional impacts of an innovative nutrition-sensitive value chain intervention, uniquely designed to address food and nutrition insecurity among smallholder cocoa, coffee, and cashew farmers in Sierra Leone. The diversity scores of household, maternal, and child diets are the main dietary outcomes employed in the study. Estimation of programme effects is carried out using the inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment, which combines the propensity score method with regression adjustments to correct for selection bias and accommodate multiple treatments. We do not find a positive impact of supporting cash crop production on the diversity of household, maternal, and child diets unless it is combined with providing information on nutrition. Specifically, combining both interventions is found to significantly improve dietary diversity and the consumption of nutritious foodstuffs at household and individual levels, in comparison with non-intervention households. We found improvements in nutrition knowledge and women empowerment to be the main pathways linking the combined intervention to better dietary outcomes. The results suggest that nutrition-sensitive investments in cash crop sectors promise to be an effective way to increase dietary diversity and sustainably reduce micronutrient deficiencies among nutritionally vulnerable smallholder families in high-value export crop sectors.

Cash crop

Value (mathematics)

10.2139/ssrn.3603918

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How Much Do Infrastructural Investments Mitigate Impacts of Seasonal Shocks on Food Security?

SSRN Electronic Journal (2019)

Henry Kankwamba Lukas Kornher

Ending extreme hunger requires the interaction of both household and community level infrastructural investments. When communities and households are capital infrastructure constrained, the effects of extreme events such as droughts can fetter consumption growth and food security. This paper, assesses the impact of seasonal weather shocks on food security conditional on access to public physical infrastructure. The study uses fixed effects regression techniques on representative Malawian panel data collected between 2010 and 2016. The study uses three key indicators of food security namely food consumption expenditure shares, the Berry Index of dietary variety, and the Shannon Entropy Index. To measure idiosyncratic and covariate shocks, self-reported survey data and high-resolution station based standardized precipitation – evapotranspiration index were used. To measure infrastructure, survey data, triangulated with remote sensed night time lights, were used to construct an infrastructure index in a logistic regression framework. Results show that assuming minimal infrastructure a standard deviation deficit in the one to three-month interval drought reduces consumption by 26%. Assuming normal historical weather conditions, infrastructure improves economic access to food by 15%. Thus, conditional on infrastructure, the impacts of extreme weather events on food security are reduced by 54%.

10.2139/ssrn.3506560

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Agroecology and resilience of smallholder food security: a systematic review

Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (2023)

Gilbert Dagunga Michael Ayamga Wolfram Laube Isaac Gershon Kodwo Ansah Lukas Kornher

Multiple covariate shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine conflict, and pre-existing climate shocks pose serious threats to smallholder livelihoods. The cascading effects of these multiple shocks, including rising prices of fertilizers and food imports, have rekindled interest in the call for a policy shift toward agroecology. Agroecology in this study is defined as a set of practices based on ecological principles of diversity, synergy, and nutrient cycling of agroecosystems, which are capable of enhancing the resilience of smallholder food security while providing ecosystem services. Proponents of the agroecology paradigm argue that it is more sustainable and resilience-enhancing. Yet, the nexus among agroecology, resilience, and food security is less understood in the literature. Therefore, this study aimed to review the existing literature to examine how agroecology could enhance the resilience and food security of smallholders. A systematic literature search was performed on Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed based on three keywords, viz. agroecology, resilience, and food security. Following the 2020 preferred reporting items on systematic review and meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines for systematic literature review, 47 articles were retained for the final review. The results provide empirical evidence that supports the potential of agroecological practices in enhancing the resilience and food security of smallholders. This study proposes a framework that links agroecology, resilience, and food security, showing the interplay among all three dimensions of agroecology—the science, policy, and practices—relevant for successful agroecological transitioning or transformation while identifying gaps for further research.

Agroecology

Resilience

Agroecosystem

10.3389/fsufs.2023.1267630

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Citations (5)

happiness_foodsecurity.tab

Harvard Dataverse (2020)

Lukas Kornher

data

10.7910/dvn/lbwcun/lbz22g

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Does food security matter to subjective well‐being? Evidence from a cross‐country panel

Journal of International Development (2021)

Lukas Kornher Tekalign Gutu Sakketa

Abstract The conventional economics literature equates welfare with consumption‐based utility, neglecting the psychological effects of uncertainty and fear of the future on well‐being. In this study, we examine how food insecurity relates to changes in subjective well‐being within a comparative analysis across different country groups between 2005 and 2018 and find that food insecurity matters to well‐being. We also examine the relationship between experienced food insecurity and well‐being, taking into account any potential endogeneity. In low‐income, food‐deficient, food‐importing and drought‐affected countries, changes in the prevalence of undernourishment explain a great deal of the variation in subjective well‐being over time.

Endogeneity

Subjective Well-Being

Consumption

Well-Being

10.1002/jid.3575

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Citations (11)

Farm wage and Rice Price dynamics in Bangladesh

Food Security (2021)

Md. Fuad Hassan Lukas Kornher

Abstract Empirical findings explaining the wage-price nexus in Bangladesh are diverse and conflicting. A proper understanding of the relationship between food prices and farm wages is essential for planning policies in support of the wellbeing and food security of the rural poor. In exploring the link between food prices and rising agricultural wages, this study analyzes the dynamic relations between those two by using monthly data from 1994 to 2014. A standard vector error correction model (VECM) is implemented to determine the short-run and long-run relationships between wages and food prices in eight divisions in Bangladesh. In addition, we use autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models to estimate the pass-through coefficients and to compare the short-run effects of rice price and urban wage shocks on agricultural wages. We find statistical evidence for a structural break between January 2007 and January 2009 in the relationships of the variables in all divisions. Different to the period until 2007/2009, after the structural break, in six out of eight divisions, rice price shocks do not transmit to the farm wages in the short-run. Moreover, our findings show that in the long-run food prices have become less influential in explaining the changes in farm wages while the influence of urban wages has become stronger in some divisions.

Distributed lag

Food Prices

Real wages

10.1007/s12571-021-01187-3

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Citations (9)

Disgusting or Innovative-Consumer Willingness to Pay for Insect Based Burger Patties in Germany

Sustainability (2019)

Lukas Kornher Martin Schellhorn Saskia Vetter

Insects represent an excellent source of food due to their density in unsaturated fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals, while their production is associated with lower emissions of greenhouse gases and resource use as compared to other conventional protein sources. In most Western countries, the human consumption of insects is very low and often perceived as culturally inappropriate. In this study, we analyzed the preferences of German consumers for insect-based products to intensify the knowledge about specific consumer segments that are willing to adopt insects into their diet. For this purpose, an online based choice experiment was conducted in 2016, in which respondents chose between an ordinary burger and a burger with a beef burger patty fortified with insect flour. We detect three homogeneous consumer segments in our sample. The largest group of respondents is willing to consume insect-fortified burgers with only a small price discount, while the other respondents had a prohibitively low willingness-to-pay. The readiness of consumers to adopt insects into their diet is strongly related to attitudinal variables, such as preferences for an environmental friendly production method and health aspects. On the other hand, disgust and the aversion towards insects seem to be the main reasons to abstain from eating insects.

Consumption

Disgust

Consumer behaviour

10.3390/su11071878

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Citations (57)

“When you need it quick, let us ship it right”: on the importance of port efficiency and service quality to comply with food trade standards in Ghana

Review of World Economics (2024)

Lukas Kornher Daniel Sakyi Linus Linnaeus Tannor

Abstract Agricultural exports are especially important because of their great potential for poverty reduction among smallholder farmers. However, many African countries, such as Ghana, fail to realize their full export potential due to institutional and technical constraints. This paper examines the importance of port efficiency and service quality in complying with food trade standards in Ghana. We provide a stylized theoretical model in which exporting firms are willing to pay for improved port service quality as long as the marginal revenue derived from a reduced likelihood of (border) rejection exceeds the marginal costs for improved service quality. We test the model’s predictions using primary data from 120 agri-food exporters in Ghana. Our results show that about two-thirds of exporting firms have a positive willingness-to-pay for a reduction in the handling time at the port and the risk of spoilage due to inadequate handling. These findings emphasize the importance of trade facilitation measures in improving port efficiency and service quality to accelerate agricultural exports.

Port (circuit theory)

10.1007/s10290-024-00549-1

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Food price volatility in developing countries and its determinants

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (2013)

Lukas Kornher Matthias Kalkuhl

The work at hand contributes to the ongoing discussion on the drivers of food price volatility. Based on theoretical considerations, economical, agricultural, and political determinants of domestic price volatility are identified and discussed. A dynamic panel is estimated to account for country fixed effects and persistence of volatility. Two approaches are followed in order to consistently estimate the impact of time-invariant variables. First, system GMM using levels instead of first differences and, second, a two step IV estimation using the residuals from the system GMM estimation. Findings suggest that stocks, production, international price volatility, and governance significantly affect domestic price variability. Furthermore, improved functionality of markets and reduced transaction costs can stabilise prices. With respect to agricultural policies, public stockholding seems to be associated with less volatility, whereas trade restrictions do not enhance price stabilisation. Lastly, landlocked countries experience less variability in grain prices, while African countries have more volatile prices than countries on other continents.

Landlocked country

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