Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis At Household Level

Food insecurity in Ethiopia is a serious problem facing humanity. Households face recurrent food shortages most of which threaten their livelihoods and impact negatively on their Welfare. Empirical findings have shown that access to sufficient food is unstable. Suggesting that whether a household or individual is food secure at any point in time is best thought of in a dynamic sense. In this paper an analysis of vulnerability is conducted to find out which groups of households are more likely to be food insecure and to remain food insecure in the near future and to identify the influencing factors of vulnerability to food insecurity. Given the lack of panel data in the study area for an ideal vulnerability assessment, the methodology of Capaldo, Karfakis, Knowles and Smulders, (2010) developed for a cross sectional data is adopted. The study comprehensively looks the food security status at household level through different descriptive and econometric tools such as GLS,and logit model. Using a sample data of 2444 rural households from the 2011 Tigray Rural Base Line Socio Economic Survey (TRBSS) the study revealed that access to adequate food in the study area is unstable, only 48.07% of households enjoy stable levels of food security. In contrast, 28.77 percent of the sampled households were found in transitory situation moving in to and out of food insecurity and 23.16% of the population is undernourished (food insecure) while also being vulnerable; these are considered chronically food insecure. Implying that, food security interventions and policies based on static analysis miss significant proportion of the population in the study area. This work also identified who are vulnerable (some of the characteristics of households with higher vulnerability to food insecurity) and its influencing factors. Hence, it will help better planning interventions to improve the food security status in general and particularly of the study area. Key words: vulnerability, food insecurity, rural Tigray.