# **1 Introduction**

The second United Nations Sustainable Development Goal calls for ending hunger and achieving food security for all people by 2030. Achieving this goal within the next ten years is now challenged by dramatic shocks to earned income, household expenditures, and agricultural value chains due to the coronavirus pandemic. Recent estimates suggest that the economic impact of the pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa specifically could be between a five and 7 percent reduction in GDP (Djiofack _et al._ , 2020). Of course GDP is only instrumentally valuable and how the pandemic influences other micro-level outcomes—such as food security—remains largely unknown. Although predictions based on expected changes to income, prices, and food supply estimate that the coronavirus pandemic will dramatically increase the number of people suffering from food insecurity and undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries (Baqueano _et al._ , 2020; FAO _et al._ , 2020), these predictions have yet to be evaluated with real-time data.

In this paper we estimate the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on food security in Mali. We combine nationally representative data collected between October 2018 and July 2019 with follow-up phone survey data collected between May and June 2020. The panel nature of these data allows us to control for important time-invariant household-level heterogeneity by including household fixed effects in our regression specifications. This is important because the effects of the pandemic may depend critically on geographic and household characteristics, such as existing vulnerabilities to income shocks (AmjathBabu _et al._ , 2020; Bene, 2020; Devereux _et al._ , 2020). These features allow us to estimate nationally representative effects while also accounting for time-invariant differences between households.<sup>1</sup> The coronavirus pandemic threatens food security in a number of ways. On the demand side, the pandemic has reduced earned income, increased poverty, and reduced household expenditures (Chetty _et al._ , 2020; Valensisi, 2020). On the supply side, the pandemic is particularly disruptive to post-farm agricultural value chains—such as wholesale and processing logistics enterprises (Reardon _et al._ , 2020). In the context of Mali, the coronavirus pandemic surged in March, in the midst of the off-season period of the agricultural cycle, thereby provoking minimal disruptions to crop production activities in rural areas.<sup>2</sup> Meanwhile, economic activities in urban areas were affected by government policies aiming to slow the spread of the virus and individual behavior motivated by fear of contracting the virus. These details, coupled with the biological dynamics of COVID-19 that spreads via close human contact, suggest that pandemic-related disruptions are likely more dramatic in Mali’s urban and rural peri-urban areas than in remote rural areas.<sup>3</sup> We exploit this heterogeneity between urban and rural areas to calculate difference-in-differences estimates of the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on food security in Mali.

We estimate the effect of the _coronavirus pandemic_ on food security, not the more specific effect of contracting the SARS CoV-2 (e.g., “COVID-19”) virus on food security. This is an important point for

> 1Similar data have been collected in a number of countries by national statistical agencies, in partnership with the World Bank.

> 2As in other Sahel countries, Mali experiences one rainy season every year. For most farmers this facilitates only one crop production period, which typically spans from mid-June through mid-September.

> 3We will investigate and validate this claim in more detail in Section 2.

2