Abstract:
Although a number of efforts have been done to achieve food security at the household level in the rural areas of Ethiopia, it has remained as a challenging goal even today. Thus, having clear picture on food security status and its major determinants helps policy makers and planners to devise new policies that enhance food security. This study was conducted to assess the situation of rural household food security in Burji special woreda. The household data were collected from systematically selected 138 respondents in four rural kebeles using structured questionnaire. In addition, focus group discussion and key informant interviews were used. The data were analyzed using mean, percentages and frequency. T-test and Chi-square test were used to describe the socio-economic, institutional and demographic characteristics of food-secure and insecure households. Binary logistic regressions model was applied to identify determinants of rural household food security status in the study area. Household calorie acquisition was used to measure the status of household food security. The survey result shows that from the total sample respondents 46.4 % were food secure and the rest 53.6% were food insecure. The logistic model was initially fitted with 13 variables of which six were found to have significance effect on the household food security. Dependency ratio was negatively influence household food security while the other variables (cultivated land size, total livestock owned, age of the household head, educational status of household head and total annual income) were positively influence household food security. Rural households have employed different coping strategies including, restricting consumption by adults to give priority to small children, reduce size of meals and sale of livestock at initial stage of food shortage as first, second and third coping strategy respectively and receiving remittance, Consume seed stock held for next season and relied on less preferred food at sever stage of food shortage as 1st, 2nd and 3rd coping strategies respectively. Therefore, the findings call for action based on advocacy family planning to curb population, strengthen adult learning programme for those illiterate households, and also it will be important to design and implement activities that can boost total annual income of households in the study area.
Key words: Food security, determinant, household, coping mechanism
