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How well do foragers protect food consumption? Panel evidence from a native Amazonian society in Bolivia

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/3605/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10745-006-9099-9
 
Title How well do foragers protect food consumption? Panel evidence from a native Amazonian society in Bolivia
 
Creator Godoy, R
Reyes-Garcia, V
Vadez, V
Leonard, W R
Byron, E
 
Subject Others
 
Description The ability of rural people to protect their food consumption matters because it captures their economic vulnerability. How well do foragers protect consumption from adverse income shocks and does protection work equally well for all people in the household? We answer the queries with data from 156 adults and 169 children collected over five consecutive quarters from the Tsimane', a native Amazonian society of foragers and farmers in Bolivia. We estimate whether quarterly changes in the logarithm of consumption bear an association with quarterly changes in the logarithm of cash income while controlling for many confounders, including covariant shocks. We use anthropometric indices of short-run nutritional status to proxy for food consumption and use instrumental variables to abate biases from the endogeneity of income. We found that child consumption was fully protected from income growth, but adult consumption was not as well protected. Estimates of income elasticities of consumption fell toward the lower range of estimates from previous studies of farming and industrial societies. We present several hypotheses to explain how the Tsimane' smooth consumption
 
Publisher Kluwer
 
Date 2007
 
Type Article
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
Rights —
 
Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/3605/1/HumanEcology35_6_723-732_2007.pdf
Godoy, R and Reyes-Garcia, V and Vadez, V and Leonard, W R and Byron, E (2007) How well do foragers protect food consumption? Panel evidence from a native Amazonian society in Bolivia. Human Ecology, 35 (6). pp. 723-732. ISSN 0300-7839