Desert locust swarms and child health

The Power of Markets: Impact of Desert Locust Invasions on Child Health

“…Table A.10 shows no detectable effect of the plague on neonatal mortality (death less than a month after birth) and infant mortality (less than a year after birth). Le and Nguyen (2022) document that exposure to swarm events decreases heightfor-age by 0.16 standard deviations, about one-third of our estimate (-0.426). This difference in magnitude is due to two main reasons.…”

“…This difference in magnitude is due to two main reasons. First, we focus on Mali, one of the poorest countries in Africa while Le and Nguyen (2022) look at several countries with most of them being less vulnerable to pest invasions. These countries also have better child nutrition and health levels.…”

“…The average impact over this larger sample will therefore give a much smaller effect. Second, we also focus on an acute plague episode while Le and Nguyen (2022) look at exposure to any swarm event including very minor and/or isolated events that did not pose a threat to agricultural production. 30…”

The Unintended Long-Run Impacts of Agro-Terrorism in Brazil

“…Second, we add to the literature on short-and long-run agricultural shocks, but we are the first to explore the effect of an agro-terrorism event with permanent effects on production. Most of this literature focus on the boll weevil disease in the US Cotton Belt (Baker et al 2019;Ager et al 2020), coffee shock prices in Latin America (Padrón and Burger 2015;Carrillo 2020;Kruger 2007), desert locust in African countries (Le and Nguyen 2022), or on the impact of climate events, such as droughts (R. Rocha and Soares 2015) and floods (Maccini and Yang 2009). The main difference is that those are temporary shocks, natural shocks, which significantly differ from the witches' broom characteristics, a disease that lasted for at least ten years and was deliberately introduced by human action.…”