Abstract for: Modeling generalized household dynamics in a famine system

Famine and nutrition and food crises represent a growing challenge in our changing world. During a famine, individual and household outcomes vary depending upon livelihoods, access to resources, and social relationships and other factors, suggesting models of household dynamics may help to better understand, forecast, and manage famine systems. The present modeling effort attempts to capture the dynamics of household behavior in "The Watch" archetype for famine dynamics described by Paul Howe in his 2010 paper "Archetypes of famine and response". In this archetype, households experiencing famine adopt coping strategies to feed themselves during the gap between agricultural harvests. The current quantitative model includes several food acquisition strategies available to an agrarian household: 1) agricultural harvests, 2) harvest from a garden, 3) purchase of food, and 4) foraging for wild foods. Food consumption is based on a body weight "set point" for each individual. When kilocalories consumed fall short of metabolic needs, weight loss and increased probability of death results. Households adopt coping strategies (e.g. foraging, rationing, purchase of food) as a threshold response to stored food. Preliminary findings suggest that it may be possible to capture these household-level dynamics and begin to gain greater insight into famine systems.