ANALYSIS OF RESILIENCE CAPACITY TO FOOD INSECURITY OF FARMING HOUSEHOLDS IN TARABA STATE, NIGERIA

The study analyzed food security status of farming households in Taraba State, Nigeria. A multi-stage sampling technique was used in selecting 398 farming households for the study. Data were collected through the use of questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive statistics, binary logistic regression and resilience capacity index. The results of binary logistic regression showed that age (p<0.01) and sex (p<0.01) of the household head, attainment of primary (p<0.01), secondary (p<0.01) and tertiary (p<0.01) education, household income (p<0.01), the proportion of adults of working age (p<0.01), farming experience (p<0.01), household size (p<0.01) and marital status such as single (p<0.01), widowed (p<0.01) and divorced (p<0.05), were the significant factors influencing food security status in the study area. The results also revealed that 63.8% of the households were resilient to food insecurity shocks, with about 66% of them having low resilience capacity. Results of coping strategies adopted by the households to attenuate the effect of food shortage indicated that about 48.2% of the households deployed all the available coping strategies in varying degree of application, with ‘reduced portion at meal time’ (97.2%), ‘reduced number of meals per day’ (96.7%), ‘restrict consumption by adults to feed children’ (96.5%), and ‘rely on less preferred food’ (94.5%) as the most commonly used coping strategies by the stressed households. The study concluded that socioeconomic characteristics of the household heads such as education, household size and income has significant influence on household food security and were prime socioeconomic determinants in achieving household’s food security and that a considerable number of households (36.2%) in the State were non resilient to food insecurity with 66.5% of the resilient households having low resilience capacity. It is therefore recommended that Policies and pro­grams aimed at improving household resilience such as strengthening adaptive capacity; prioritizing access to basic services and implementing social safety nets should be implemented to foster household and national resilience capacity to food insecurity