Resources

High levels of acute food insecurity persist in 2023 due to protracted food crises and new shocks – but there are improvements in some countries.

The report analyzes the evolution of weekly maize and rice prices in four East African countries - Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda - in August 2023.

The report presents price trends and movements for key food commodities, including dry beans, dry maize, rice, wheat, and Irish potatoes, for August 2023, in selected major regions and markets in Kenya.

The war in Ukraine and India's export restrictions on rice have dominated commodity news in recent weeks. In late July, India announced a ban on non-Basmati rice exports and has since then imposed further restrictions on Basmati and parboiled rice exports. Those restrictions, combined with El Niño-related concerns over rice production in the region, have roiled rice markets, with Thai prices rising 20 percent since last month. Wheat prices are still under pressure from abundant Black Sea exports at competitive prices, but markets remain volatile as the termination of the Black Sea Grain Initiative and Russian attacks on Ukraine export facilities have heightened uncertainty. Global soybean and maize production prospects are improved this year with some stock rebuilding anticipated despite dryness in North America, Argentina and parts of Europe.

The prices of staple grains on international markets began to rise in mid-2020 in response to higher fertilizer prices and supply constraints associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. They further spiked in early 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. This brief examines the impact of these events on poverty in Nigeria. It is part of a series of six such briefs that estimate the poverty impact of higher world prices for staple grains. The other briefs cover Kenya, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali (see Minot and Martin, 2023a and 2023b; Martin and Minot, 2023a, 2023b, and 2023c).
The methodological approach is similar in all six country studies. First, we examine the effect of the increases in international cereal prices on the real price of key grains in the domestic markets of the country. Second, we estimate the impact of the changes in domestic grain prices on the real income of each household using nationally-representative survey data, taking into account the importance of the commodities in consumption and as a source of income for each household. Finally, we estimate the changes in headcount poverty (the share of people living below the poverty line) based on the changes in real income for each household in the sample. We focus on the prices of maize, wheat, and sorghum for reasons discussed below.