Key findings
- Dietary diversity falls sharply after maize price spikes, but the decline is almost twice as large where weekly markets are more than two hours away.
- Households with stronger off-farm income links partially hedge consumption, yet children’s micronutrient-rich food shares remain sensitive to transport costs.
- Simulated input voucher timing shifts the incidence of the shock across within-household allocation — equity implications for safety-net design.
Why this question matters
Staple price volatility is routinely monitored at the wholesale level, yet policy responses often assume homogeneous pass-through to rural plates. If market access conditions who bears the burden, aggregate price indices can mis-rank districts for targeting.
Ghana’s maize markets integrate unevenly across the forest–savanna transition. We exploit that spatial heterogeneity together with repeated household consumption modules to separate price exposure from local liquidity and information frictions.
Data and approach
We assemble a panel of household food consumption, travel time to nearest periodic market, and localized maize prices derived from enumerator price trackers. A mediation framework quantifies how much of the price shock operates through reduced diversity versus direct budget effects.
Robustness checks include alternative market definitions, placebo outcomes, and controls for rainfall shocks to isolate price channels.
Implications for programs
Nutrition-sensitive social protection may need to layer transport vouchers or mobile procurement pilots in thin-market hinterlands, not only price subsidies at urban hubs.
Monitoring systems that report only national maize prices will understate vulnerability in communities where the last-mile wedge is wide.