From ritual sacrifice to agricultural resilience: the unintended consequences of COVID-19 on rural livestock use in Madagascar

Abstract Famadihana , a funerary ritual involving the exhumation and rewrapping of ancestral remains, plays a central role in shaping household economic behavior in rural Madagascar, often prioritizing social and cultural obligations over productive investment and food security. The ritual typically entails substantial expenditures and the liquidation of key productive assets, particularly cattle. The COVID-19 pandemic, by restricting large gatherings, generated an exogenous disruption to this practice, creating a quasi-natural experiment to examine how shocks affect the interaction between cultural norms, livestock management, and household welfare. Using a unique seven-year high-frequency panel dataset from central Madagascar (two pre-pandemic and five post-pandemic years), this study analyses how households adjusted their behavior following this disruption. The results show that, in the post-pandemic period, households that continued to participate in Famadihana were significantly less likely to sell cattle, with this effect emerging in the medium term. Livestock retention is associated with larger herds of meat-producing animals and increased manure production and utilization. However, among participating households, cattle sales are positively associated with loan uptake, indicating that some households combine asset sales with borrowing to meet ritual expenses. These findings point to a differentiated adjustment: while the overall decline in cattle sales suggests a shift toward asset preservation that may strengthen agricultural sustainability and protein availability, a subset of households faces increased liquidity pressure linked to continued ritual participation. The study highlights how external shocks can temporarily reshape culturally embedded economic behaviors, with implications for resilience, food systems, and the design of context-sensitive rural development policies.