ASSESSEMENT OF HOUSEHOLD FOOD INSECURITY IN WERA WOREDA, HALABA ZONE, SOUTHERN ETHIOPIA

Abstract 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. Therefore, this study intended to assess the household food insecurity status, the coping strategy and associated factors among. Overall, 285 households were selected from the four kebele by multistage sampling (purposive and systematic random). Data were collected using questionnaire, structured interviewing household heads, FGD and observation. The study comprehensively looks the food security status at household level through different descriptive and econometric tools. In this study the categorization of households in to food secure and food insecure is based on an assessment of whether household current consumption is above or below the minimum recommended food energy consumption (measured in kilocalories). Multivariable logistic regression was used to develop model indicating the predictors of outcome variable. Based on the findings of this study, about 66.7% households were food secure and the remaining 33.3% were food insecure. Factors associated with household food insecurity were age, household size, landholding size, agricultural input and household monthly income were statistically significant at 95% CI. However, sex and marital status were not statistically significant at the same confidence level. In the other hand, population increase, seasonal change, land fragmentation and low extension services are also factors for household food insecurity in the study area. The analysis of the coping strategies shows that households practice diverse mechanisms. These include rely on less expensive food, buy necessities, stick to the budget, skip meal, maintain a food garden, borrow food from friends, gather wild vegetables. Engaging households in income generating activities, awareness creation on family planning, rainwater harvesting and providing various inputs were recommended by the investigator to reverse household food insecurity problem in the study area.