Price hike of staple food, nutritional impact and consumption adjustment: evidence from the 2005–2010 rice price increase in rural Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper studies the nutritional impact and the adjustment in consumption as a result of the 2005-2010 rice price increase in rural Bangladesh. We compare the net rice buyers, who suffer from a negative income effect, with the self sufficient households. Our findings indicate that rural households in Bangladesh cope well with the surge in the domestic rice price as indicated by the absence of any effect on their calorie intake and food diversity. Income plays a crucial role in dietary diversity indicating the importance of effective income support programmes at the time of food price shocks.

Impacts of the 2008 Great Recession on dietary intake: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Overall, findings suggest that there may have been a decrease in dietary quality over the Great Recession, although given the three high quality studies reporting an increase in dietary quality, this cannot be ruled out. There was little consistency across measures, for example Food Consumption Score decreased in Haiti but did not significantly change in Bangladesh [49,63]. There was also little consistency within countries.…”

“…Ten studies assessed changes in energy intake, generally located in high and middle income countries [31-33, 39, 40, 43, 48, 49, 51, 64]. Seven used daily calorie intake as the outcome [32,39,43,48,49,51,64], while one used monthly intake in kJ [33] and one examined changes in growth rates using non-individual data [40]. For one study based in seven different countries in Latin America, only data from Guatemala were available from the authors [48].…”

“…We were unable to obtain standard deviations for a UK study so this was omitted from the meta-analysis, as was a Danish study assessing how Consumer Confidence Index affects energy intake [33,51]. Seven studies were included in our random effects metaanalysis [31,32,39,43,48,49,64] four of these studies were high quality [31,39,49,64]. All had representative samples, adequate sample-size, adequate ascertainment of exposure, adequate ascertainment of outcome, and samples were comparable with regard to analysis and controlling for confounders.…”

“…2). When the meta-analysis was run for middle-income countries (Guatemala and Pakistan, the former low quality and the latter high quality [48,49]), energy intake increased by 105.5 cal per adult per day (95% confidence Interval: 72.8, 138.2), with an I 2 statistic of 0.0%, indicating very low heterogeneity (Fig. 3).…”

“…These studies were generally located in high and low income countries. Outcomes were heterogeneous, including Dietary Diversity Score [42,49], Food Consumption Score [49,63], and HEI [50,51]. Eight studies (four of which were of high quality) reported negative impacts [32,38,42,50,53,60,63,64] and three (all high quality) reported positive impacts [44,49,51] on dietary indices (Fig.…”