our estimates toward zero and despite this reality, we estimate effects with substantial and meaningful magnitudes.

Third, our estimates only represent the short-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic on food security. As the spread of the virus began in Bamako, and therefore initial containment policies were most intense in the capitol city, the short-term effect of the pandemic is more directly felt by urban households. As time progresses, and the agricultural season gets underway, it is plausible, and in fact likely, that rural households will be increasingly affected by the consequences of the pandemic (Amjath-Babu _et al._ , 2020). Future research which specifically examines the medium- and long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic, in both rural and urban areas, is absolutely essential.

Finally, we are unable to credibly identify mechanisms that explain our main findings. Research in India suggests that food prices in urban areas have increased which could lead to challenges relating to food security, especially for households that have lost a primary source of income due to pandemic-related disruptions (Narayanan and Saha, 2020). It is plausible that this mechanism persists in Mali, however, we do not have the data to examine this empirically. We do show some descriptive evidence suggesting that the pandemic has reduced the frequency of visits to the market or grocery store, but there is very little difference between households in urban and rural areas. Therefore, this type of extensive margin behavior change does not seem to explain our main results in a meaningful fashion. Future research should focus on identifying the mechanisms that explain these results to help inform effective policy responses.

# **6 Conclusion**

We add to the emerging research that estimates the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on food security in low- and middle-income countries (Amare _et al._ , 2020; Ceballos _et al._ , 2020; Mahmud and Riley, 2020). Using nationally representative pre-pandemic household survey data and a follow-up phone survey from Mali, our difference-in-difference estimates highlight a dramatic increase in food insecurity. These difference-in-difference estimates rely on sub-national variation in the intensity of pandemic-related disruptions between urban and rural areas. Although we aim to validate our understanding of the variation in intensity of these disruptions with data on recorded COVID-19 infections, Google mobility data, and our phone survey data, it remains likely that the pandemic also disrupted food systems in rural areas. Therefore, our results in this paper are likely an estimate of the lower bound of the effect of the pandemic on food security in Mali. Despite this limitation, we estimate effects with meaningful magnitudes that are substantially larger than existing predictions of the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on food security globally.

Existing predictions of the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on food security globally—based on expected changes to income, prices, and food supply—point to an increase in the number of undernourished people in the world of 10–16 percent in 2020 (Baqueano _et al._ , 2020; FAO _et al._ , 2020). Our estimates document important heterogeneity in this global aggregate prediction. In Mali our difference-in-difference 16