Fuel for food: Access to clean cooking fuel and food security in India

While the health and environmental impacts of using biomass fuels for cooking are well-established in the literature, there is little empirical evidence on the impacts of such dirty cooking fuels on household food security. In this paper, we assess the impact of using biomass fuels on the daily number of meals consumed in India using a household-level panel covering six districts over the period (2015–2018). We apply Poisson fixed effects models and Kernel matching difference-in-difference estimation and find that using dirty fuel as primary cooking fuel reduces the number of meals per day with an estimated 1.5%. We derive that the effect of cooking fuel type is equivalent to an impact on nutrition from a 2.6 to 6.25% change in household expenditures, given estimated calorie-income elasticity for India in the literature. In addition, our results reveal that the use of dirty cooking fuel is associated with increased time for cooking, increased frequency of fuelwood collection and lower satisfaction with the cooking arrangement – which can partially explain the negative effect on nutrition. In terms of policy implications, the results thus highlight important synergies not only between the type of cooking fuel and food security, but also the time saving associated with a clean cooking fuel could imply a considerable improvement in women’s wellbeing and could be beneficial from a gender equality perspective.