Factors Affecting Food Security: A Case of Tanzania

The study examines the factors that affect food security and their implications in Tanzania. The key factors in this study includes population density, temperature, agricultural land, precipitation, carbon dioxide emissions, and exchange rate. Additionally, the study utilized secondary time series data from 1990 to 2022. Also, the study main objectives were to determine the short-term and long-term effect of the key factors on food security by Vector Error Correction model. At a significance level of 5%, the short-term estimation result indicates that the exchange rate is the only factor that significantly influences food security in Tanzania. Other factors like population density, temperature, amount of arable land, precipitation, and carbon dioxide, however, have no discernible short-term effects on food security. Furthermore, all factors have a significant impact on Tanzania's food security at the 5% level in the long-term estimate. Due to that, the study reommends that government should focus on as well as make discission and develop effective policy for the population densitcy, temperature, agricultural land, precipitation, carbon dioxide emissions, and exchange rate, so as to increase food availability, access, and usage for its people. Moreover, more research should also look into other factors that might also have an impact on food security since this study focused on only few variables.