Sanctioned to Starve? The Impact of Economic Sanctions on Food Security in Targeted States

Economic sanctions are imposed by senders to create the maximum economic damage in order to coerce the target to change its objectionable policy, however its impact may have varying and unintended consequences for targets. One of such possible consequences could be sanctions exacerbating the state of food insecurity in targeted states. In this chapter, we analyze whether the imposition of sanctions adversely affects food security in targeted states by looking at its impact on different measures of food security from both Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Our results show the imposition of sanctions has deleterious effect on food security. Sanctions significantly increases the composite index of global hunger index (GHI), and also adversely affect the availability and stability dimensions of food security. In addition, we find that employing financial and trade sanctions simultaneously have a more pronounced adverse impact on food security compared to when they are used separately. Our results are robust to different empirical approaches (fixed effects and entropy balancing) as well as to different data sources (FAO and IFPRI)