The Global Food Crisis and Guatemala: What Crisis and for Whom?

SummaryInternational food prices rose sharply during 2006–08, precipitating the “global food crisis.” We analyze the welfare effects of changes in prices over categories of households in Guatemala and find three surprising results. The first is that the transmission of international into domestic prices was quite modest. The second is that most farm households are net buyers of food implying that they lost from rising prices. The third is that farm households represent two-thirds of all poor households losing from rising food prices, stressing the importance of production for home consumption in sheltering the poor from the crisis.