Determinants of food security in Southern Ethiopia at the household level

In the early 1980s, a paradigm shift occurred in the field of food security, following Amartya Sens (1981) claims that food insecurity is more of a demand concern, affecting the poor's access to food, than a supply concern, affecting availability of food at the national level. Despite the wide acceptance of Sen's thinking, many controversies including the relative importance of supply-side versus demand-side variables in causing and solving food insecurity have remained in academic and policy circles. This study develops a recursive household food security model within the framework of consumer demand and production theories following Singh et al. (1986), and parses out the relative importance of supply-side versus demand-side variables in determining household food security in southern Ethiopia. Based on results of a test of full/reduced model and the magnitude of changes in conditional probabilities of food security, we conclude that the supply-side variables are more powerful determinants of food security than the demand-side variables. Copyright 2005 International Association of Agricultural Economics.