Abstract
Ending hunger is a key goal of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in 2015. This goal notwithstanding, the prevalence of severe food insecurity of the world’s population has increased. It is highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the seasonality of harvests leads to fluctuations in food insecurity, particularly in the lean season, the time before the harvest is brought in. We posit that addressing seasonal food insecurity requires not only increased food production, as is commonly argued, but also consideration of post-harvest losses during storage. Here we present the results of a randomized control trial on the effects of improved on-farm storage on seasonal food insecurity. Our intervention provided farming households from two districts in Tanzania with hermetic storage bags that can help reduce storage losses. Seasonal food insecurity was measured via multiple rounds of SMS-based surveys. The results show that the intervention reduced the proportion of severely food insecure households by 38% on average in the lean season, and by 20% in the full seasonal cycle. These findings demonstrate that a simple and inexpensive technology could contribute strongly to reducing seasonal food insecurity and improving smallholder farmers’ year-round access to food.
Highlights
Ending hunger and ensuring access to food all year round is a key objective of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 2015)
The results show that the experimental treatment reduces the prevalence of severe food insecurity, and that the intent-to-treat (ITT) effect varies with seasonality
The prevalence of severe food insecurity is highest in the lean season when an estimated 30.1% of households in the control group are severely food insecure (June Y1, Table 1)
Summary
Ending hunger and ensuring access to food all year round is a key objective of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 2015). In the three years since the adoption of the Agenda in 2015, the prevalence of severe food insecurity has increased from 8.4 to 10.2% of the world’s population (FAO, 2018). The prevalence of food insecurity is highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 29.8% of the population affected by severe food insecurity (FAO, 2018). In Sub-Saharan Africa, about 70–80% of farms are less than two hectares in size (Lowder et al, 2016) These small-scale farming households depend on food and income from their annual or semi-annual harvests. In the past 30 days, how many days did your household rely on less preferred or less expensive food due to lack of food/money? In the past 30 days, how many days did your household limit portion sizes at mealtime due to lack of food/money? Sample sizes for pairs (m) and total number of observations (n) (m/n): 31/671
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