The recent food price crisis and the following global economic recession have led
to large increase in the number of people to suffer from hunger. While the impacts can be
measured with precision ex post, for policy-makers it is critical to get a sense of likely
impacts ex ante to plan approaches to mitigate these impacts. In this paper we adopt a very
simple simulation approach to analyze how changes in prices of specific food groups such as
maize prices or prices for staple food as well as how negative short-term income shocks on
household affect the calorie consumption of individuals and how these changes affect food
poverty. We illustrate our approach using household survey data from Malawi and Uganda.
We find that food poverty is of particular concern in Malawi and Uganda and we find large
variations within countries in food poverty. We find that price shocks for staple foods have a
very large impact on food security in both countries while the impact of income shocks is
considerably smaller. Moreover, we find that the food security impacts of price shocks are
substantially larger in Malawi than Uganda as people in this country rely much more on
staple foods for their caloric consumption. This paper demonstrates that it is possible to
estimate food security impact of price and income shocks ex ante in a relatively straightforward
fashion that can be done relatively quickly for cross-country assessments of the
likely impacts of shocks on food security.