Abstract
Improved food security remains a major challenge for policymakers in Afghanistan. The objective of this study is to investigate the prevalence and drivers of food insecurity among farming households in the Takhar region of Afghanistan. Household questionnaire survey datasets were obtained from 262 farmers via multi-stage sampling across four districts. The Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) was constructed to assess the prevalence of food insecurity, and an ordered probit econometric model was used to identify the factors influencing the prevalence rates in farming families. The findings indicate that 66.79% of the farming households were food insecure, whilst 30.53% were severely food insecure. After adjustment of socio-economic and demographic characteristics of families, the ordered probit results reveals that household head education, dependency ratio, farm income, access to non-agricultural income, livestock unit, group membership, borrowing, farm diseases, flood, and war significantly influenced farming households’ food insecurity in the study area. Our findings highlight the urgent requirement for policies and initiatives to support farmers to improve their overall food security. Such strategies should focus on introducing improved farming techniques, enhancing farmer education levels, livestock development programs, building and empowering farmers groups, creating credit access to households, and providing humanitarian food support.
Highlights
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They mainly include factors related to socio-economics, such as household head age, education level, gender, marital status, farming experience, family size, dependency ratio, farm income, non-farm income, land size, livestock, membership, extension contact, borrowing, farm disease, war, and flood variables
The findings indicated that farming households with a high degree of household head education, a high farm income, access to non-agriculture income, and large livestock units were less likely to be food insecure
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Food insecurity is a condition where there is an inadequate quantity of affordable, appropriately nutritional, and secure food or the capacity to achieve enough food in a socially acceptable way is restricted [1,2]. Food insecurity is categorized as inadequate food consumption, inadequate food access, and vulnerability to subsistence mechanisms that produce sufficient food regularly and are not resilient in shock [3]. Despite some improvement in addressing global malnutrition and hunger, food security remains the main concern for individuals and households worldwide [2,4]. The recent estimates by FAO in 2018 [5] show that 26.4% of the world’s inhabitants are food insecure
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