Conceptual framework on price volatility and its impact on food and nutrition security in the short term

This paper establishes a conceptual framework that links short-term price changes with food and nutrition security. We first provide an overview on the causes of commodity price volatility and approaches to measure volatility. Next, different concepts to measure food security impacts are elaborated and discussed. In contrast to consumption, utility or perception based indicators, anthropometric indicators provide the most direct measure of nutritional impacts. An extensive literature review emphasizes that anthropometric indicators can respond significantly within few months to shocks like droughts, seasonality or economic crises. As there is few research on the impact of price shocks to nutritional status, the developed conceptual framework elaborates different channels how price changes and price risks affect households and food security. The paper concludes with implications for further research to analyze the impact of price volatility on food security empirically.