[Seminaire CREM] The Value of Monitoring for Disaster Prevention: The Desert Locust - Faculté Des Sciences Economiques

Abstract:
Monitoring systems for diseases and pests are active in most countries, detecting early signs of potentially disastrous outbreaks in time for preventative action. These monitoring systems are costly, however, and measuring their economic value requires estimating damages from outbreaks in empirical settings where monitoring is neither uniform nor exogenous. We estimate the value of monitoring systems for the desert locust—known to devour entire agricultural fields—and their impact on human well-being. Our analysis uses data from 1985 to 2020 across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, including locust monitoring records and data from the Demographic and Health Surveys. We leverage conflict and weather events in locust breeding areas to detect the effects of monitoring interruptions on locust swarm outbreaks. We then reconstruct the spatial patterns of locust migrations to propagate these effects on locust swarm outbreaks beyond breeding areas. Finally, we show that in-utero exposure to a locust swarm reduces height-for-age by 0.37 standard deviations and increases the probability of stunting by 7 percentage points (a 17% increase). Taken together, these estimates suggest that in the absence of effective locust monitoring, an additional 550 thousand children per birth cohort in the affected countries would experience stunting, creating economic losses of US$1.3 billion per year. This implies a benefit-cost ratio of over 30 for locust monitoring budgets.