Food consumption patterns welfare and food security

With food insecurity becoming a perpetual challenge in Kenya, this study on food patterns, welfare, and food security sought to provide robust and detailed evidence on the patterns of food consumption and how they relate to household income, prices, household demographic characteristics, urbanization, and economic policy reforms. The study evaluates the patterns of food consumption across urban and rural areas. Impacts of urbanization and economic liberalization on temporal patterns of food consumption are estimated from time series food consumption and price data. Committing to a robust economic empirical approach, the study explores the linkage between empirical food demand analysis and welfare estimation techniques to bring out the impacts of the 2008/09 food price crisis on household welfare. Further, the impacts of price changes on welfare are simulated and empirically linked to bring out food insecurity prevalence, gap, and severity borrowing approaches from poverty analysis techniques. The study also explores the ‘would be’ effects of increased vertical market integration on food insecurity, and welfare effects of reducing import tariffs on imported cereals. There is clear evidence that food price crisis accentuated food insecurity. It is also evident that reduction of import tariffs and improving market integration could be effective ways of fighting food insecurity in Kenya.