Vulnerability to Food Insecurity and Households' Coping Strategies

Abstract

Nearly, a billion people globally are food insecure. Over 90 per cent of them are from sub-Saharan African countries, of which Ethiopia is part. The country has been renounced by its food insecurity level and dependent on food aid for decades. Severity of food insecurity in the country is mainly deep in rural areas and smallholder farmers are vulnerable to the shocks of food shortage. The aim of this study is to assess household's vulnerability to food insecurity and coping strategies with evidence from southern Ethiopia. In this study, universal coping strategy questions were used to answer "What do farmers do when they don't have enough food, and don't have enough money to buy food?" The finding indicates that about 79.2 per cent of households are vulnerable to food insecurity and responded to food shortage shocks in different ways. Over half of the respondents reduced meal frequency and consumed enset (is a false banana grown in southern and south western part of Ethiopia which is used to cope food shortages during drought seasons) while others consumed less preferred food (44.2 per cent). The rest adapted asset depleting strategies like borrowing grain (35.4 per cent), using saved money (27.5 per cent), and selling livestock (25 per cent) to cope with food insecurity. This shows that unless asset building and income enhancing strategies are promoted; vulnerable people will deplete assets and fall in chronic food insecurity. The average coping strategy is 13.4 while it is 16.4 for the very poor households implying that they face more severe food insecurity than non-poor households. Therefore, in order to build the resilience of rural households towards food shortage shocks, asset transfer strategies, access to credit services, and diverse income generating enterprises should be promoted.