Abstract
Close to 14 million people in Nigeria, including children, are malnourished. I hypothesize that demographic considerations play an important role in food insecurity within Nigerian households. Using data from three waves of the World Bank’s Living Standard Measurement Survey for Nigeria, I illustrate spatial patterns of food security in the country. Using fixed effects regressions, I also show that, at the household level, larger households have worse food security outcomes and are more likely to report being food insecure. Children from large households also suffer worse malnutrition outcomes. This relationship is significant in urban Nigeria as well, with implications for sustainable urban planning and family planning to address unmet need for contraceptives.
Highlights
The idea that a nation’s population growth may have significant effects on individuals’ access to food and other resources is not new and was postulated my Malthus as far back as the 1800s
The fixed effects model may be specified as follows: FoodSecurityh,t = 0 + hFerth,t + hXh,t + tTt + h,t where FoodSecurityh,t refers to the various food security measures constructed at the household level (i.e., Reduced Coping Strategies Index (RCSI), Food Consumption Score (FCS), Household Hunger Scale (HHS), etc.)
We find that wealthy households are associated with better food security
Summary
The idea that a nation’s population growth may have significant effects on individuals’ access to food and other resources is not new and was postulated my Malthus as far back as the 1800s. Given the growth of cities around the world, in Nigeria, the study focuses on food security implications on urban areas in the country. The use of a single measure of food security was emphasized by the researchers themselves as a serious limitation of their study, given that reduced coping strategy findings may be context- or setting-specific. This indicator should be validated against other indicators such as food consumption (household, individual), poverty measures (income and expenditure) and individual health and nutritional status—a caution that is repeated by several other researchers.
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