Food and nutrition security status in Southwest region of Ethiopia: Evidence from Kaffa zone

Abstract

Hunger eradication as being one of the sustainable development goal and critical contributor for economic growth, the extent of poverty and food insecurity had become the limiting factor not to achieve these goals because of different constraints. Therefore, the current study investigated the status and determinants of food and nutrition security in one of Ethiopian zones encountered with an alarming trend of productivity decline but endowed with different natural resources which is Kaffa zone of Southwest region. The finding generally implies, large proportion of households who were food secured were also nutrition secured, compared to their counters. Unlikely, lager proportions of nutrition secured households were found to be food insecure but from the entire nutrition non-secured households, small proportion of them were found to be food insecure. The study further indicates that, 65.87% and 87.11% of the entire households were food and nutrition secured, respectively. This implies that, though there is low production and productivity of crops in the study area which affects food security status of the household due to minimized daily calorie intake, it is rich in the availability of different edible crops that constitute for boosting dietary diversity and food consumption score which results in nutrition security. Among the main constraining factors of food and nutrition security found using logit model, sex of the household head, family size, education level of the household head, land size, irrigation, livestock holding, off-farm and non-farm activities are the core and significant in the study area. Thus, improving access to irrigation, introducing off/non-farm activities for the households through promoting better credit facility via the establishment of adequate rural financial institutions, promoting family planning and enhancing the existing livestock veterinary services can be considered as a panacea to improve both food and nutrition security of the rural households in the study area.