Abstract
BackgroundAccess to sufficient food is essential for household welfare as well as for accomplishing other development activities. Households with insufficient access to food often face other challenges related to food insecurity including poor health and a decline in productivity. These challenges can often create a vicious circle whereby households are unable to produce enough food even during a good crop season. Thus, this study aimed to determine the magnitude of food insecurity and its determinants in rural households of Farta District, Northwest Ethiopia.MethodsA community based cross-sectional study was conducted from September to October 2012. Household heads were recruited using a multistage random sampling technique. Data were collected by face-to-face interviews using the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) tool after verbal informed consent. Data were entered to Epi info 2002 and exported to SPSS version 16 for analysis. Multiple logistic regressions were fitted and odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals were calculated to identify associated factors and control confounding effect.ResultsA total of 836 households were included in this study. Nearly three quarters of the households (70.7%) had food insecurity. Households headed by females (AOR = 3.18, 95% CI:1.08, 15.21), lack of education (AOR = 2.59, 95% CI: 1.46, 4.60), family size of 4-7 (AOR = 2.39, 95% CI: 1.21,4.70), family size of >7 (AOR = 13.23,95% CI:6.18, 28.32), few or absence of livestock (AOR = 5.60, 95% CI:1.28, 24.43), absence of income from off-farm activities (AOR = 3.12, 95% CI:1.53, 6.36), lack of irrigation (AOR = 3.54, 95% CI:2.14, 5.18) and lack of perennial income (AOR = 3.15, 95% CI:1.88, 5.27) were factors associated with food insecurity.ConclusionsThis study revealed that most households of the district were food insecure. Hence, the promotion of contraceptive use, off-farm employment activities and the development of small scale irrigation are important recommendations to reduce food insecurity.
Highlights
Access to sufficient food is essential for household welfare as well as for accomplishing other development activities
The Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit statistic was used to check if the necessary assumptions for multiple logistic regressions were fulfilled and the model had p-value >0.05 which suggests the model is good. Both bi-variate and multivariate logistic regressions were fitted to identify factors associated with food insecurity
Socio-demographic characteristics A total of 836 households were included in this study
Summary
Access to sufficient food is essential for household welfare as well as for accomplishing other development activities. Households with insufficient access to food often face other challenges related to food insecurity including poor health and a decline in productivity. Food insecurity exists when people lack access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food, and are not consuming enough food for an active and healthy life. This may be due to the unavailability of food, inadequate purchasing power, or inappropriate utilization at household level. The annual food deficit increased from about 0.75 million tons in 1979-1980 to 1.4 million tons in 2000 It was estimated in 2004 that up to 60% of the rural and 40 percent of urban population faced the risk of food insecurity in Ethiopia [9]. A total of 7.5 million chronically food insecure people received productive safety net program (PSNP) assistance in 2009 [10]
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