What Implications Does The World Food Price Rise Have For Food Security In Bangladesh

Bangladesh has often been regarded as a country whose food security situation is frequently worsened by price rise of essential foodstuffs. Rice has been the most significant cereal food in Bangladesh because it accounts for around 42 percent of per capita daily energy intake. Food price rise has become the most serious concern of majority of the country’s household as price rise becomes the regular phenomenon in the country. One-third of the country’s total population have been living under the poverty line. Regardless of the domestic rice production, Bangladesh imports around three million tonnes of rice every year which constitutes 17 percent of the country’s total import. Therefore, this empirical paper has attempted to explore how Bangladeshi local rice price is being affected by the world rice price, and how rising rice price affects household food security. In doing so, co-integration model and error correction model were applied to weekly rice price data obtained from the on-line database of the Food Policy Monitoring Unit of the Ministry of Food, Government of Bangladesh. The results confirm that world rice price and Bangladesh local market rice price are co-integrated. Although there has not been any immediate impact of world price shock in Bangladesh due to the influence of short term measures taken by the government, there are long term impacts of such price shock. Logit model has been employed to determine the rice price threshold beyond which households become unable to ensure their food security. For this purpose a sample of 80 poor households whose per capita income was less than $1, was surveyed in order to obtain the required data. The results of the logit model suggest that if rice price goes beyond Tk 34 per kilogram, sample poor households become extremely vulnerable in respect of food security. Finally, some recommendations have been made at the end of this paper based on the empirical findings.