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Abstract
Niger faces many natural and human constraints explaining the erratic evolution of its agricultural production over time. Unfortunately, this is likely to cause a decline in the food supply. This study attempts to identify factors affecting rural households’ resilience to food insecurity in Niger. For this, we first create a resilience index by using principal component analysis and later apply structural equation modeling to identify its determinants. Data from the 2010 National Survey on Households’ Vulnerability to Food Insecurity done by the National Institute of Statistics is used. The study shows that asset and social safety net indicators are significant and have a positive impact on households’ resilience. Climate change approximated by long-term mean rainfall has a negative and significant effect on households’ resilience. Therefore, to strengthen households’ resilience to food insecurity, there is a need to increase assistance to households through social safety nets and to help them gather more resources in order to acquire more assets. Furthermore, early warning of climatic events could alert households, especially farmers, to be prepared and avoid important losses that they experience anytime an uneven climatic event occurs.
Highlights
Niger belongs to one of the hottest areas of the planet where rainfall is characterized by high inter-annual and space-time variability
For Ericksen [2], concern about the global environmental change for food systems is based on the following remarks: (i) the persistence of chronic food insecurity in parts of the world; (ii) the increasing impact of natural hazards and shocks on food, income and environmental security; (iii) the ecosystem services enabling food production systems being eroded via environmental trends such as changes in nutrient cycles, changes in hydrological cycles, changes in vegetation cover and composition, and pollution; and (iv) the inadequacy to substitute for ecosystem services
Estimating the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy, we found that the variables used for the principal component analysis (PCA) are relevant (KMO = 0.5576, above the recommended value of 0.5)
Summary
Niger belongs to one of the hottest areas of the planet where rainfall is characterized by high inter-annual and space-time variability. Like other Sahelian countries, Niger faces many natural constraints such as desertification, silting of water resources, and erosion. In addition to all these challenges, Niger is facing demographic pressure with a population growth rate of 3.9% per year, and an average fertility index of 7.6 children per woman [1] This involves pressure on land use, cultivation of the marginal lands of the northern part of the country and reduction in available grazing areas in the intermediate zone. These natural and human constraints explain the erratic evolution of the country’s agricultural production (characterized by a deficit almost every two years) over the past 20 years. For Ericksen [2], concern about the global environmental change for food systems is based on the following remarks: (i) the persistence of chronic food insecurity in parts of the world; (ii) the increasing impact of natural hazards and shocks on food, income and environmental security; (iii) the ecosystem services enabling food production systems being eroded via environmental trends such as changes in nutrient cycles, changes in hydrological cycles, changes in vegetation cover and composition, and pollution; and (iv) the inadequacy to substitute for ecosystem services
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