South Asia is home to 387 million severely food-insecure people, making it crucial to opt for sustainable solutions to ensure food security (FS), which aligns with the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 2.1. Thus, this study unveils whether agrifood climate finance (ACF) and access to electricity (ELC) help induce FS, considering six South Asian countries from 2000 to 2022 using the cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL), quantile regression, and mediation analysis. This study also unveils the direct and mediating effects of human capital (HC) and institutional quality (ISQ). While the study underlines the negative impact of ACF on FS, the non-linear effect of ACF2 notably induces FS, implying the U-shaped effect, which shows that while initially ACF reduces FS, beyond a point, increased investments towards ACF can induce FS in the long run. The findings also disclose the short- and long-run positive effects of ELC and the significant positive impact of ISQ and HC on food security. Nonetheless, the mediation analysis reveals that while ELC mainly exerts an immediate effect, more than half of the impacts of ACF come from ISQ and HC-mediated effects. Thus, this study suggests incorporating policies for raising domestic climate finance, advancing power grid systems, and strengthening ISQ through a bottom-up approach to realize sustainable goals.
Behera et al. (2025) studied this question.