# **5.1 Descriptive Results**

These descriptive results provide insight by directly asking respondents if indicators for food insecurity are due “specifically to the COVID-19 crisis.” This allows for a self-reported causal statement, which is not necessarily equivalent to causal identification in the statistical use of the phrase. Nevertheless, these descriptive results highlight how respondents understand changes in their lives in the time of the coronavirus pandemic.

Figure 5 shows descriptive results using the May-June 2020 phone survey from Mali. The results suggest that the coronavirus pandemic has dramatically reduced the food security of households in Mali.<sup>13</sup> Overall, 50 percent of the full sample is worried that they will not have enough to eat. Of those households, 65 percent report that this worry is specifically due to COVID-19. This finding, that a substantial share of households identify COVID-19 as an important cause of food security challenges, is largely driven by households in urban areas. Specifically, we see an 11 percentage points difference, between urban and rural areas, in those who identify COVID-19 as the source of their worry that they will not have enough to eat. Similar findings persist for most of the remaining FIES questions. Across seven of eight food security indicators, the exception being FS8 which is only experienced by less than 4 percent of households, a larger share of households living in urban areas than in rural areas report food security challenges due to COVID-19. In five out of the eight food security indicators the difference between urban and rural areas in reporting of food security challenges due to COVID-19 is statistically significant at conventional levels.

These findings are striking for at least two reasons. First, specifically in the context of Mali, food security is on average more challenging in rural areas. Despite this, urban households tend to be more likely than rural households to identify COVID-19 as the most important cause of their food security challenges. In particular, 48 percent of rural households, compared to 42 percent of urban households, indicate being worried that they cannot eat nutritious foods. However, 53 percent of rural households, compared to 65 percent of urban households, indicate that this is primarily due to COVID-19— this difference is statistically significant at conventional levels. Second, this highlights the validity of previous predictions that the coronavirus pandemic would be more disruptive to food systems in dense urban and rural peri-urban areas (Reardon _et al._ , 2020). Additionally, as previously discussed, this finding helps support our identification strategy where we exploit sub-national variation in the intensity of the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic.

# **5.2 Estimation Results**

We now turn to discussing results from estimating variations of equation (1). In this sub-section we discuss four sets of results: first considering the full raw FIES score and the remaining three considering increasingly severe levels of food insecurity.

> 13Table A3 in the Supplemental Appendix provides additional details on the statistics reported in Figure 5.

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