The effects of natural disasters on staple food prices in Sub-Saharan Africa: Does regional trade help?

In this paper I firstly investigate the effects of natural disasters on staple food prices in Sub-Saharan Africa by means of a panel data regression. Then I verify the extent to which intra-African trade helps mitigate the volatility of prices that arise after natural disasters. I focus on three types of disasters (floods, droughts, and storms), and six crucial staple foods (maize, wheat, rice, cassava, sorghum, millet). The database includes 30 Sub-Saharan African countries and spans over the period 1992 to 2017. The findings show that staple food prices are extremely sensitive to natural disasters and to trade in SSA. The effect is highly heterogeneous across the products, but also across the regions within SSA.