Analysis of Rural Households’ Vulnerability to Food Insecurity in Ethiopia

Abstract

This study analyzes rural households’ vulnerability to food insecurity in Ethiopia, using a sample data of 3115 rural households from the Ethiopian Socio-economic Survey (ESS). Calorie method was employed to determine food insecurity and vulnerability. In addition to descriptive statistics, GLS and the Logit models were used to analyze the data. The Results indicates that 63% (1961 out of 3115) were found to be food insecure whereas, the rest 37.05% of the households were found to be food secure. Furthermore, the estimated logit model result revealed that rainfall shock, death of livestock positively and significantly influenced current food insecurity status of household. , Furthermore, age of household head, education level of the household head, annual household farm income, participation in off- farm activity, access to credit and remittance negatively affected the extent of households’ food insecurity. General least squares regression results indicate that total land holding ( ha) of the household head has a significantly positive correlation with calorie intake and households’ access to credit significantly increased expectation of food consumption. Empirical findings also showed that rainfall shocks (environmental shocks) have larger impact on vulnerability to food insecurity. Based on the intensity of their vulnerability, households were grouped into highly vulnerable-food secure (18.4 percent), and low vulnerable-food secure (45.84 percent). Overall, about 54.4 percent of households were categorized as vulnerable to food insecurity.