Highlights on food security:

Households continue to suffer from conflict and macroeconomic shocks including high food price inflation. Findings from the fifth round of the Myanmar Households Welfare Survey (MHWS), conducted by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) between March – June 2023, indicates that food insecurity has worsened since 2021/22. The proportion of households with a borderline or poor food consumption score – a measure of nutritional value and food frequency – increased to 17.7 percent, up from 9.4 percent in the first round (Dec 2021 to Feb 2022). The shares were highest in Chin, Kayah, and Kachin.

Inadequate diet diversity among adults rose from 20.6 to 27.2 percent. Rising food prices, conflict and physical insecurity were found to increase the likelihood of poor diet quality, while remittance-receiving households were less likely to experience hunger or poor dietary diversity. More recently, in August 2023, FAO-WFP reported that about 5 percent more households had adopted additional crisis and emergency coping strategies since May 2023.

Worsening food security is large part explained by high and rising food prices. The recent high food

price inflation has been particularly damaging in the context of weak nominal household incomes. World Bank analysis using MLCS and WFP surveys indicates that for households in the bottom two quintiles of the consumption distribution, prices of the six major commodities (rice, pulses, edible oil, onions, eggs and tomatoes) have increased by an average of 16.6 percent annually between 2017 and June 2023. This is about 2.3 percentage points per year higher than for the households at the top of the consumption distribution. This is because poorer households tend to live in areas in which food prices at local markets have risen more quickly. This means that, every year, the poorest households have paid more than the richest households to achieve the same level of consumption of these six major food items. Moreover, food accounts for 64 percent of total consumption of the poorest quintile, versus 43 percent of the consumption of the richest quintile, exacerbating the impact of the relatively rapid food price inflation that the poor experience and making it more likely that important non-food expenditures on education, health, and other productive human capital investments will be crowded out.

Most households have reported reduced income levels. Results from the fifth round of MHWS27 show that during the first six months of 2023, 40.2 percent of households reported lower income compared with the previous year (55 percent in earlier rounds), with 24.5 percent reporting income losses equal or greater than 20 percent. Only about 25.2 percent of households saw their income increase. Between mid-2022 to mid-2023, the median real total income of households excluding on-farm households, declined by 10.6 percent in rural areas and 10.0 percent in urban areas.