Food Insecurity and Gender in Turbulent Times: Evidence from New Data for Egypt

The Russian war in Ukraine led to significant disruptions in trade in cereals, especially wheat and other products that are key for food security. Thus, the objective of this paper is to investigate the impact the war in Ukraine on food security in Egypt from a gender lens using a newly collected dataset. The case of Egypt is of particular interest as it is the largest importer of wheat; it experienced other concurrent economic crises; and is among the largest economies the Middle East and North Africa. This is why this paper tries to distinguish the impact of the war in Ukraine from other reasons that led to a more fragile food security. The main findings show that, the war is not the sole responsible of food insecurity in Egypt. Indeed, the way the domestic economic policies were implemented increased this insecurity. Second, female headed-households and women in female-headed household were the most to bear the cost of the crisis in terms a stronger food insecurity. Finally, whereas these categories were more likely to adopt different coping strategies to face the crisis, the government support did not have a significant impact to reduce the negative implications of the war on food insecurity. JEL classification: J16, H56, Q18.