Challenges of food security and coping strategies among rural households in Tigray, Ethiopia
Lemlem Fitwi WELDEMARIAM, University of Vienna, Austria
Patrick SAKDAPOLRAK, University of Vienna, Austria
Ayansina AYANLADE, University of Vienna, Austria
Food security has been a challenging issue globally for the last decodes, where considerable number of populations are facing difficulties to deal with the hunger. Ethiopia is among the countries that face persistent challenges to achieve food security. Yet, the subjective dimension of food security did not get much attention in the food security literature. This study, therefore, aims at assessing food security in Ethiopia's Tigray region, using self-reported parameters; applying household food insecurity access scale (HFIAS) score and coping behaviors. We assessed how different livelihoods contribute to household food security where migration is been assessed as a coping to food stress as well as adaptive livelihood strategy. The paper further examines the need to integrate livelihood approach to assess food security. Qualitative research approach was used for the study where Participatory Research Approach (PRA) methods and household interviews were employed to acquire the data. Data transcription, cleaning, coding, and restructuring were performed on the datasets while descriptive statistics, including frequency and cross-tabulation, were used in the analyses. HFIAS results show mildly food insecurity and consumption of foods of the same variety, cheaper or less preferred, remittance, reduction of food portion size, selling of assets, daily labor and borrow money or grain were among the reversible coping strategies applied when food crisis persists . The household's livelihoods perused includes non-farm local activities 69% and remittance 64%. The results further revealed that all the households engaged in agriculture (100%) with 67% of them owned an average of 0.5ha of land. The major finding reveals that households with diversified livelihoods including remittance income were found to be more food secure; therefore, we concluded that the overall livelihood has to be addressed to realize the rural household's food security
Keywords: food insecurity|coping strategies|livelihoods|migration|Ethiopia
A105514LW