both the identification and interpretation of our estimates. Our empirical strategy exploits sub-national heterogeneity in pandemic-related disruptions between urban and rural areas in Mali. This strategy is similar to that employed by Ravindran and Shah (2020) who exploit sub-national heterogeneity in pandemic-related disruptions to estimate the effect of the pandemic on domestic violence in India. Our results do not rely on COVID-19 tests accurately identifying the true rate of infection in Mali.

Our paper is related to emerging work on the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. Much of the existing research focuses on labor market outcomes in high-income countries (Adams-Prassl _et al._ , 2020; Alon _et al._ , 2020; Barrero _et al._ , 2020; Bartik _et al._ , 2020; Bui _et al._ , 2020; Chetty _et al._ , 2020; Coibion _et al._ , 2020; Cowan, 2020). A smaller set of studies focuses on low- and middle-income countries and we aim to add to this literature (Aggarwal _et al._ , 2020; Amare _et al._ , 2020; Arndt _et al._ , 2020; Djiofack _et al._ , 2020; Ceballos _et al._ , 2020; Gerard _et al._ , 2020; Jain _et al._ , 2020; Josephson _et al._ , 2020; Kerr and Thornton, 2020; Mahmud and Riley, 2020; Valensisi, 2020). To the best of our knowledge, Amare _et al._ (2020) is the only other paper that estimates the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on food security using real-time data in a nationally representative sample. However, Amare _et al._ (2020) are not able to make use of a complete food security measurement tool.<sup>4</sup> Complementary analyses of sub-national populations by Mahmud and Riley (2020) and Ceballos _et al._ (2020) document a dramatic decrease in food expenditures in rural Uganda and food security in two Indian states, respectively. Adding important nuance, Aggarwal _et al._ (2020) find that although the coronavirus pandemic led to severe disruptions in market activity and large declines in income among market vendors in rural areas of both Liberia and Malawi, they find no short-run effect on food security. Other researchers and analysts have raised serious concerns about the disruption of food systems (Reardon _et al._ , 2020) and food security (Arndt _et al._ , 2020; Mishra and Rampal, 2020; Narayanan and Saha, 2020; FAO _et al._ , 2020) but do not quantify the extent nor the effects of the disruption. Finally, existing predictions using expected changes to income, prices, and food supply support this serious concern for food security in low- and middle-income countries (Baqueano _et al._ , 2020; FAO _et al._ , 2020). Although these predictions provide valuable insight, they ultimately rely on expected changes rather than micro-level data measuring real-time-changes.

We make three core contributions. First, we provide self-reported descriptive evidence of how respondents themselves perceive that the coronavirus pandemic has influenced their food security. These results suggest the pandemic has had dramatic effects. For example, 50 percent of households report being worried that they will not have enough food to eat. Of those households, 65 percent identify the coronavirus pandemic as the most important cause of their food security worries. Moreover, despite higher incidence of food insecurity experience in rural areas, we find that respondents in urban areas more frequently identify the pandemic as the most important cause of their food security challenges. These self-reported descriptive results motivate a more sophisticated estimation approach to quantify the effect of the pandemic on food security.

> 4For unknown reasons, the first round of the COVID-19 phone survey in Nigeria only included three of the eight Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) questions.

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