Proximity to the Plague: Measuring Locust Exposure and Child Health

I investigate the early childhood health outcomes of the Kenyan 2020–2021 desert locust invasion. To accountfor the multi-harvest setting, I build a treatment that conditions on the insect’s biological capacityto damage vegetation, the growth stage of the local crop, and subsequent vegetal decline, matching georeferencedlocust observations to the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. Children exposed inutero within 30 km of a verified damage event carry weight-for-height z-scores 0.185 standard deviationsbelow the control group, and are 26 percent more likely to be clinically wasted. Effects are strongestwhen children are exposed in the second and third trimester. Riverine livelihood zones, where householdsdepend heavily on their own harvest and have the least market cushion lose an additional 0.25 standarddeviations on weight-for-height beyond the average cropping-zone effect. The results suggest that thehealth consequences of an agricultural shock hinge on substitution as the key margin of adjustment, withhouseholds least able to replace lost harvests through markets bearing the largest nutritional penalty.