Abstract
This paper uses regionally representative panel household survey data of 1,186 households in the high agriculture potential zone located in the Central and Northern regions to assess household food security trends and its drivers, specifically to determine the extent landholdings have influenced food security dynamics in rural Northern-Central Mozambique. The main finding of this study is that although food security level has been stable over the study period, the agricultural production, rural non-farm activities, establishment of food reserves, food availability, assets, and access to non-farm income opportunities and transportation have influenced food security level of the rural families. This suggests that investing in infrastructures such as public transportation and roads, minimizing agricultural production risks, promoting in education and livestock production aremore likely to have a larger effect on the extremely poor households than on the less poor when wage employment opportunities and proper training are available.
Highlights
Poverty, hunger, and malnutrition are three main constraints affecting the livelihoods of human beings in most parts of the worlds
We focus on landholdings because it is belied that the most prominent cause of malnutrition and poverty is the land scarcity [9] and as argued by [10], access to land has a positive effect on poor people, regarding food security
This study aims to address three main questions: (i) how food security level changed over time? (ii) what determined those changes, to what extent landholdings have influenced these changes? (iii) How does land access affect the pathways out of food insecurity? finding answers, the above questions will allow drawing policy implications as to address poverty reduction in rural Mozambique
Summary
Hunger, and malnutrition are three main constraints affecting the livelihoods of human beings in most parts of the worlds. The government of Mozambique has committed to reducing poverty from 70 percent in 1997 to 40 percent by 2015 through several interventions to reduce poverty and food insecurity, such as: the construction of silos with 50,000 metric ton capacity for grain storage in Tete province, improvement of infrastructure such as the construction of the bridge across Zambezi river which links the main production areas to consumption areas [2] and increasing agriculture production All these interventions witness an impressive economic growth which shows a GDP growth of more than 6.3 percent per year since 2006 [3]. This scenario is exacerbated by cyclical climatic disasters (floods and droughts) and food price crisis in 2008 leaving no other option to the government but to engage in food aid to meet domestic needs
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