Household food security and its determinants in agrarian communities of southeastern Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated household food security (food accessibility) and its determinants in eight agrarian communities of Southeastern Nigeria where food accessibility was measured using per capita monthly food expenditure, and households were classified into food secure and food insecure. Four hundred (400) households were selected using stratified and random sampling methods. The results revealed that the categorization of households into either food secure or food insecure was a function of money spent on food monthly and household size, making household food security status differ within and across households and communities. The general findings revealed that majority (53.5%) of households were food insecure while 46.5% were food secure. Oguta community was revealed as the most food secure because majority of her households (68%) recorded relatively high per capita monthly food expenditure coupled with small household sizes while the reverse is the case with Ossomala community where 67.2% of households were food insecure. The Logistic regression analysis run to show the relationship between food security status and 23 predictors drawn from literature and observation, showed that only five were significant (p < 0.05) namely (with their coefficients) marital status (−0.347), level of education (0.540), monthly income (1.719), dependency ratio (−3.385) and distance to market (−0.880). The direction of their regression coefficients revealed that households headed by unmarried persons with higher level of education and monthly income as well as with fewer dependants were more food secure, and food security decreased with increasing distance to market in Southeastern Nigeria.

Food Security Status and Its Determinant Factors in Central Ethiopia: Empirical Evidence from Walmara District

“…Additionally, as dependents increase per family, there will be a higher burden on the active family members and this, in turn, affects households' food security status. This result is consistent with the results reported by Goshu (2016), Dawit and Zeray (2017), Mustapha et al (2018), andAkukwe (2020). Livestock holding in TLU: As hypothesized, livestock holding affected household food security positively and significantly at a 5 percent significance level.…”

Households food security and perception of food nutrition in Enugu State, Nigeria

“…This has reduced the purchasing power of households thereby affecting their food security. Studies have supported this finding that household income strongly affects their food security (Akukwe, 2020;Etea et al, 2019).…”

Perceived Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Security in Southeast Nigeria

“…Again, 76.1% of the households had a no response to the minimum food requirements implying that they were not able to meet the minimum food requirements as specified basically due to the sudden emergence of the COVID-19 Pandemic which swept the whole world off their feet (WHO, 2020c).These groups of households reported making use of any available food at their disposals in satisfying their domestic food needs during the Pandemic and thus, did not bother meeting the minimum food requirements as specified. That is, they were of less concern to minimum food requirements owing to the negative effects of COVID-19 in term of food shortage and unavailability in Southeast Nigeria (Akukwe, 2019;Ekoh et al, 2021). However, 13.4% of the households gave a zero response to the minimum food requirements, implying that they were neither here nor there, regarding the minimum food requirements.…”

“…Earlier, several empirical studies had looked at the food security situations in Nigeria, (Babatunde et al, 2007;Agada and Igbokwe, 2015;Ahmed et al, 2015) examined the factors influencing food security and its coping strategies. Akukwe (2019) evaluated household food security and its determinants, while Egwue et al (2020) and Agbawodikeizu et al (2021) investigated food insecurity of rural households during COVID-19 and the impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on economic activities and well-being of older adults in Southeast Nigeria. Amongst these studies, none had assessed the perceived effect of COVID-19 Pandemic on individual household food security with reference to COVID19 determinants, recommended food consumption, calorie in-takes, and food sources of individual households before and after the Pandemic.…”

“…More of fish and seafood were consumed before the Pandemic with over 187% of the households. Fish and seafood are protein-rich food materials which are needed by each household in bodybuilding, tissue growth, and development (Akukwe, 2019). The impact of the COVID-19 situation which occurred suddenly deprived majority of the households from accessing the food material partly because of the forceful incarceration of the fishermen who were barred from fishing and also due to the unavailability of the food materials due to lockdown which prevented the smooth supply and delivery of such food materials by fish merchandise (Ohiaa et al, 2020).…”