This brief places emphasis on fertiliser subsidies and social cash transfers as alternative, but overlapping, policy instruments for protecting chronically vulnerable people from hunger. When undertaken as scaled-up programmes, each of these policies entails a regular annual budget commitment by government, but involves different mechanisms by which vulnerability reduction is tackled in the short- and long-run. To the extent that they address the different needs of different vulnerable groups, or different time horizons for their effectiveness, they can be seen as complementary policies. On the other hand, they both compete for scarce public resources, and each represents an ‘opportunity cost' compared to the other with respect to their relative success at achieving vulnerability reduction outcomes. The objective of this briefing paper is to examine in detail the comparisons, contrasts and trade-offs between these two policy instruments. This is an important task since it may indicate adjustments in the relative funding priority that is attached to each of them in order to enhance their complementarity in pursuit of the common goal that they both strive to achieve.