Three essays on weather shocks, nutrition and forests

Climate-related shocks, such as droughts and floods, can have particularly harmful effects for poor rural households in developing countries. In this dissertation, I determine how forests affect a household's ability to cope with shocks, estimate how agricultural input use changes after shocks, and explore a novel explanation for high rates of undernutrition within food-producing households. In the first essay, using data from Malawi, I find that households allocate labor away from agriculture to forests in the event of a weather shock and that access to forests offsets the negative effect of weather shocks on nutrition and food security. In the second essay, I use nationally representative data on smallholder households in Zambia and find that, after a weather shock, households are less likely to use a risky input and more likely to use a less risky input because they become more risk-averse. Access to credit can mitigate the negative impact of a shock on the likelihood of using fertilizer. In the last essay, I use household production and demographic data from a household survey that I conducted in Zambia to measure nutrition deficits created by insufficient food production or food sales that, if consumed at home, would have contributed to household nutrition. I find that nutrient deficits, from either insufficient production or selling output, are detrimental to nutrition and food security. High lean season food prices reduce the quantity of market-bought foods demanded and undermine the ability of households to use income from crop sales to purchase food. In summary, rural households respond to shocks in various ways. Both natural resource access and improved credit markets can offset the negative impacts from a shock while increasing food production and nutrition outcomes.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Agricultural and Resource Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Colorado State University. Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Authors dc:creator

• Mulungu, Kelvin, author
• Manning, Dale, advisor
• Seidl, Andrew, advisor
• Costanigro, Marco, committee member
• Bellows, Laura, committee member

• natural insurance
• risk aversion
• weather shocks
• nutrition
• forests
• technology adoption

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.

Language dc:language.iso

eng, English

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.25675/3.02602

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mountainscholar.org:10217/219637