Abstract

Nepal has been persistently encountering food insecurity and under-nutrition. It is therefore utmost important to determine the factors responsible for influencing food insecurity in Nepal. This study examines the factors determining food insecurity in Nepal applying binary logistic models for food poverty, household with inadequate food consumption and poor dietary diversity using data from Nepal Living Standard Survey 2010/11. Food security was determined to be strongly associated with education level and age of household head, household with higher female education level, larger farm size with higher ratio of irrigated land, better access to markets, roads and cooperatives, better household assets and remittance recipient households. Food insecure is relatively more prevalent in rural areas with higher dependent on rain-fed agriculture, higher dependency ratio and larger family size. Improving both physical and economic access to foods, together with investment in education and agriculture could help to reduce food insecurity and hunger from Nepal.

Agricultural prices have risen worldwide sharply in the last two years, which has been a dilemma especially to policy makers. Higher agricultural prices would improve farmer's income and their living standards as well as investment in agriculture provided a fair mechanism of income transfer to them be instituted. However, the price rise seriously affects urban poors' food affordability and thus their livelihood. Various types of natural disasters particularly floods, droughts and landsides have affected agricultural crop production in Nepal resulting in fluctuations in food supplies and prices. Besides, policy measures associated with crop production, food balance and trade, petroleum price stabilization and liquor production directly or indirectly affect food market and prices. National food production, demand-supply, consumption and price scenarios and associated reasons are analyzed based on reviews of pertinent literatures.  Key words: Food production, food consumption, demand-supply, price-scenario, NepalThe Journal of Agriculture and Environment Vol:.9, Jun.2008  Page: 93-97