This paper reviews the role of food aid in response to humanitarian emergencies. It outlines a set of basic principles for effective food aid interventions, and analyses a number of case studies in humanitarian response. The paper distinguishes between rapid onset and slow onset emergencies and...

Widespread hunger and malnutrition persist today despite considerable growth in per capita food availability. This has prompted an evolving conceptualization of food security and of mechanisms to attain and maintain food security. This chapter discusses both food security and food assistance...

Among the millions of Americans who suffer from food insecurity in the United States, only a fraction utilizes the nation’s 60,000 food pantries. Stigma is commonly cited as a barrier to use. Stigma can arise from any of several sources. However, some may be due to the perceived product...

Resilience offers a useful lens for studying how human well-being and the systems on which it depends can absorb and recover from a range of shocks and stressors, including events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking beyond the direct effects of observable shocks and individual or household...

The dramatic increase in the price of rice and other commodities over the past year has generated new interest in how these markets work and how they can be improved. This article uses an exceptionally rich data set to test the extent to which markets in Madagascar are integrated across space at...

Food-for-work (FFW) programmes have been widely heralded as a means of providing self-targeting transfers coupled with investment in public goods. This paper reviews the changing context that has sparked such interest in FFW, the simple theory that makes it so conceptually appealing, and...

This paper surveys the existing empirical evidence on the unintended consequences of food aid. Micro-level evidence is presented on the impacts of food aid deliveries on household labour supply, production incentives, consumption patterns and natural resource use. At the meso-level, evidence on...

This paper outlines a coherent strategy for the use of food aid in addressing food insecurity. It surveys recent literature on poverty traps, the rights-based approach to food security and discusses where food aid fits into an integrated analysis of poverty and food security. The paper...

Food-for-work (FFW) programs are widely touted for their capacity to target poor populations effectively with a reliable safety net, thereby reducing vulnerability due to downside risk exposure, while simultaneously investing in the production or maintenance of valuable public goods necessary to...

We employ censored least absolute deviations and multivariate Tobit estimators to investigate whether food aid flows from the main donor countries respond to recipient country needs as reflected in low food availability, low income, or both. We also explore the hypothesis that donor countries...