Food Insecurity as a Trigger of Migration Intentions: Evidence from a Pandemic Shock in Five Latin American Countries

Abstract

Poverty and hunger are well-established drivers of emigration, but the literature largely treats food insecurity as a standing condition rather than something that moves. This paper asks whether a sudden, economy-wide deterioration in food security shifts migration intentions, and whether it does so differently from chronic deprivation. Using the second wave of the World Bank’s Phase 2 High Frequency Phone Surveys for Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic (n=5,565), we exploit a survey design that records food insecurity both at interview and retrospectively for the pre-pandemic period, allowing current and structural food insecurity to enter the same specification. Severe current food insecurity is associated with an 11.9 percentage point increase in the probability of intending to emigrate (95% CI: 6.9-16.9), against 4.6 points for pre-pandemic food insecurity. When the outcome is instead whether the intention rose during the pandemic, current food insecurity remains significant (5.5 points) while the pre-pandemic measure is indistinguishable from zero. Classifying households by their food security transition sharpens the result: the pandemic-era rise in intentions is concentrated among the newly food insecure (7.8 points), while the chronically food insecure show no differential rise. Intentions rose across the wealth distribution but most sharply in the top quintile and among the tertiary educated, groups with little direct exposure to hunger, which is consistent with intentions responding to perceived country conditions rather than to private deprivation alone. The results suggest that food security shocks do not merely intensify existing migration pressure but may alter who considers leaving, with implications for the design of shock-responsive social protection in migrant-sending countries.