Adaptation to climate change and the impacts on household food security among rural farmers in uMzinyathi District of Kwazulu-Natal,South Africa

It is anticipated that smallholder subsistence farmers will face severe negative impacts from climate change, with household food security being seriously affected. This paper examines the methods of adaptation to climate change used by smallholder farmers and their impacts on household food security. The necessity to adapt to climate change is caused by a combination of sensitivity and exposure and the success in doing so depends on adaptive capacity. Household food security was determined using the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS). Of the surveyed households, 95 % were aware that climate is changing and expected severe impacts on their crop production systems. Households undertake crop and soil management practices in order to respond to the changing climate. About 83 % of households anticipated that they would alter their livelihoods systems in response to climate change, with 59 % of households indicating that government grants would play an important role in this. Of those assessed, 97 % were severely food insecure and the remaining 3 % were moderately food insecure. Householders were worried about the negative impacts of climate change which included droughts, floods and soil erosion. Householders who were vulnerable to climate change recorded high levels of food insecurity. Decline in prices of farm products, increases in costs of farm inputs and anxiety over occurrence of livestock diseases exacerbated household food insecurity. Information will play a critical role in mitigating the impacts of climate change on household food security but farmers should also be assisted with appropriate input packages, such as seeds and fertilizers that can help them adapt effectively.     

Household food security in the face of climate change in the Hindu-Kush Himalayan region

This study attempts to understand local people’s perceptions of climate change, its impacts on agriculture and household food security, and local adaptation strategies in the Hindu-Kush Himalayan (HKH) region, using data from 8083 households (HHs) from four river sub-basins (SBs), i.e. Upper Indus (Pakistan), Eastern Brahmaputra (India), Koshi (Nepal) and Salween and Mekong (China). The majority of households in SBs, in recent years, have perceived that there have been more frequent incidences of floods, landslides, droughts, livestock diseases and crop pests, and have attributed these to climate change. These changes have led to low agricultural production and income, particularly in Eastern Brahmaputra (EB) where a substantial proportion of HHs reported a decline in the production of almost all staple and cash crops, resulting in very low farm income. Consequently, households’ dependency on external food items supplied from plain areas has increased, particularly in the Upper Indus (UI) and EB. After hazards, households face transitory food insecurity owing to damage to their local food systems and livelihood sources, and constrained food supply from other areas. To cope with these, HHs in SBs make changes in their farming practices and livestock management. In EB, 11 % of HHs took on new off-farm activities within the SB and in SM, 23 % of HHs chose out-migration as an adaptation strategy. Lastly, the study proposes policy instruments for attaining sustainable food security, based on agro-ecological potential and opportunities for increasing agricultural resilience and diversity of livelihoods.     

Coupling of soil regeneration,food security,and nutrition outcomes in Andean subsistence agroecosystems

To sustain the livelihoods of smallholder farmers globally, improved human nutrition must not sacrifice future agroecosystem productivity. We gathered environmental, agricultural management, food security (FS), and normalized child height for age (HAZ; children age < 2y) data from 297 farming households to test whether enhanced FS and nutrition goals can be aligned with agroecosystem maintenance in Andean farming systems that rely heavily on the local environment. Our results demonstrate many expected relationships between environment, agriculture, and nutrition in these communities’ households, for example between ecosystem biomass production and manuring rates, between total household crop production and FS, and between HAZ and child diet diversity. However, increased FS status evaluated by households was unrelated to HAZ as an indicator of nutrition status. By contrast, better child nutrition and feeding practices in some households were associated not with total production but with farming practices that sustain soils and secure higher per-hectare crop yields: longer fallows, greater crop diversity, and smaller cropped areas. These results may be explained by the tendency for agricultural practices correlated with household food insecurity (e.g. reduced manure inputs, greater cropped area) to increase labor and impede appropriate feeding and child nutrition while they accelerate environmental degradation. Crop production imperatives for food supply can thus degrade soils without delivering improved nutrition. Meanwhile, more sustainable practices in households with better child nutrition (e.g. smaller, better-manured crop areas) may address time barriers to effective care and feeding. We discuss challenges and opportunities based on these results for meeting both nutrition and environmental goals.     

Adaptation to Climate Change by Smallholder Farmers in Rural Communities: Evidence from Sri Lanka

The agricultural sector plays a key role in Sri Lankan economy, whose major source of livelihoods is smallholder farming in paddy and vegetable cultivation which is highly vulnerable to climate changes having negative impact on food security. To overcome the welfare losses, the smallholder farmers need to identify the changes in climatic variables and adjust to their farming practices to cope up with the climate change. Thus, this study examines how rural smallholder farmers in different agro-ecological zones in Sri Lanka perceive climate change and accordingly adapt to it in their agricultural practices. A questionnaire survey was conducted with a random sample of 125 farmer households distributed in most vulnerable four agro-ecological zones namely, Belihuloya, Ihala Galagama, Mulgama and Kosgama in up country inter mediate zone. The study shows that all the respondents have observed rising trends in temperature and winds and lack of adequate rainfall during last twenty years and in response they have grown short season crops as the main farming practice to adapt to minimize the potential losses on their yields. The results of the logistic regression revealed that social economic factors, environmental factors, institutional factors and the economic structure influence farmers’ choice of adaptation methods to climate change. The size of the household, income, education, accessibility to climate information through television and radio, being a member in farmers’ group, location of the land, crop variety, access to formal loans and distance to input markets had significantly affected adaptation. For instance the farmers who grow beans as the major crop to adapt to climate change has 94% probability with compared to those farmers who do not grow other crops whereas the farmers who come to know the changing patterns of the climate through television and radio have a higher probability (94%) of adaptation to the climate change than those who use other media. Sri Lankan government requires facilitating the smallholder farmers to overcome the constraints in which they face in using adaptation methods to climate change so that the welfare of the farmers and growth of the agricultural sector can be ensured.     

Food security in a remittance based economy

We interviewed 395 subsistence farming households from Chitwan, Nepal in order to identify the impact of remittances and other explanatory variables on child, adult, and household food security. The highest category of the IV - ordered probit regression models with cluster robust standard errors indicated that the food security status of households, adults and children was explained by gender and age of household head, adoption of conservation agricultural technology, number of fruit trees, and income from agricultural and livestock sources. Additional variables affecting only children’s food security were the adoption of hybrid rice or maize varieties and the wage income or salary earned within the district, whereas an additional variable affecting only household and adult food security was the wage income earned outside the district. Households receiving international remittances were more food secure than those households that did not receive such remittances.     

Implications of climate-smart strategy adoption by farm households for food security in Tanzania

As the climate changes, farmers in developing countries seek to employ strategies to help them sustain food production. The objectives of this paper were to identify adaptation strategies in response to climate change and the determinants for their adoption, and to explore the impact of these strategies on food security. The analysis was based on a survey of 900 small-scale farmers in a semi-arid (Dodoma) and a semi-humid (Morogoro) region in Tanzania. Farmers in the semi-humid region tended to diversify their crops, i.e. added additional crop types. Given the more challenging environment in the semi-arid region, farmers there changed their portfolio of crops, i.e. substituted some crops or cultivars with others. Logistic regressions highlighted higher tolerance to risk, land ownership, education and experiences of farmers as drivers of adoption, while income diversification had a negative effect. The propensity score matching approach showed that adopters of climate-smart strategies are on-average more food-secure. These users showed a more diverse pattern of food consumption, greater protein intake and better economic access to food. Changing crop portfolios can help households to cope with climate-related shocks such as droughts and thus appears to be the best performing strategy, especially in terms of more stable food provisioning throughout the year.     

Impact of a participatory agroecological development project on household wealth and food security in Malawi

This paper presents the impacts of a participatory agroecological development project on food security and wealth levels. The Malawi Farmer to Farmer Agroecology project (MAFFA) encourages farmer experimentation, community involvement and farmer-to-farmer teaching on agroecology, nutrition and gender equity. Recent international assessments of agriculture have highlighted the urgent need for changes in farming practices in Sub-Saharan Africa, due to land degradation, high levels of food insecurity and anticipated climate change impacts. Agroecological approaches have shown great potential to address these multiple needs. Using a longitudinal panel survey data and propensity score matching to account for selection bias in project participation, we analyzed the impact of the project on household income and food security in Malawi in 2012 (Wave 1 = 1200 households) and in 2014 (Wave 2 = 1000 households). We used the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) for impact evaluation. Estimates of average treatment-effects using difference in difference methods showed that participating in MAFFA has led to a significant increase in household wealth (β = 3.54, p = 0.01) and a large reduction in food insecurity (β = ?3.21, p = 0.01) compared to non-participants, after 2 years, even after accounting for covariates and selection bias. These results indicate that agroecological methods combined with farmer led knowledge exchanges can be welfare enhancing, both in terms of food security and in terms of income for family farm households. Agroecological approaches should be promoted through upscaling of farmer-to-farmer knowledge exchanges, community involvement and attention to nutrition and social equity to enhance farmer learning and household welfare benefits.     

Synergies and tradeoffs between cash crop production and food security: a case study in rural Ghana

Despite dramatic improvements in global crop yields over the past half-century, chronic food insecurity persists in many parts of the world. Farming crops for sale (cash cropping) has been recommended as a way to increase income that can, in turn, improve food security for smallholder farmers. Despite long-term efforts by development agencies and government to promote cash cropping, there is limited evidence documenting a relationship between these crops and the food security of households cultivating them. We used a mixed methods approach to build a case study to assess these relationships by collecting quantitative and qualitative data from cacao and oil palm farmers in the Ashanti region of Ghana. Three dimensions of food security were considered: food availability, measured by the months in a year households reported inadequate food; food access, indicated by the coping strategies they employed to secure sufficient food; and food utilization, gauged by the diversity of household diets and anthropometric measurements of child nutritional status. We found significant negative relationships between each of these pillars of food security and a household’s intensity of cash crop production, measured by both quantity and area. A qualitative assessment indicated community perception of these tradeoffs and identified potential mechanisms, including increasing food prices and competing activities for land use, as underlying causes. The adverse relationship between cash crop production and household food security observed in this paper calls for caution; results suggest that positive relationships cannot be assumed, and that further empirical evidence is needed to better understand these tradeoffs.     

Crop health and its global impacts on the components of food security

The literature on the importance of plant pathogens sometimes emphasizes their possible role in historical food shortages and even in famines. Aside from such major crises, plant pathogens should also be seen as important reducers of crop performances, with impacts on system sustainability, from the ecological, agronomical, social, and economic standpoints – all contributing ultimately to affecting food security. These views need reconciliation in order to produce a clearer picture of the multidimensional effects of plant disease epidemics. Such a picture is needed for disease management today, but would also be useful for future policies. This article attempts to develop a framework that would enable assessment of the impacts of plant diseases, referred collectively to as crop health, on food security via its components. We have combined three different existing definitions of food security in order to develop a framework consisting of the following six components: (1) Availability. Primary production; (2) Availability. Import - Stockpiles; (3) Access. Physical and supply chain; (4) Access. Economic; (5) Stability of food availability; (6) Utility-Safety-Quality-Nutritive value. In this framework, components of food security are combined with three attributes of production situations: the nature of the considered crop (i.e. food- or non-food), the structure of farms (i.e. subsistence or commercial), and the structure of markets (i.e. weakly organized and local, to strongly organized and globalized). The resulting matrix: [Food security components] × [Attributes of production situations] provides a framework where the impacts of chronic, acute, and emerging plant disease epidemics on food security can be examined. We propose that, given the number of components and interactions at play, a systems modelling approach is required to address the functioning of food systems exposed to plant disease risks. This approach would have application in both the management of the current attrition of crop performances by plant diseases, and also of possible disease-induced shocks. Such an approach would also enable quantifying shifts in disease vulnerability of production situations, and therefore, of food systems, as a result of climate change, globalization, and evolving crop health.     

Are food insecure smallholder households making changes in their farming practices? Evidence from East Africa

We explore the relationship between farming practice changes made by households coping with the huge demographic, economic, and ecological changes they have seen in the last 10?years and household food security. We examine whether households that have been introducing new practices, such as improved management of crops, soil, land, water, and livestock (e.g. cover crops, micro-catchments, ridges, rotations, improved pastures, and trees) and new technologies (e.g. improved seeds, shorter-cycle and drought-tolerant varieties) are more likely to be food secure than less innovative farming households. Using data from a baseline household survey carried out in five sites and 700 households in four countries of East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia) across a range of agricultural systems and environments, this study contributes to the evidence base of what smallholders are doing to adapt to changing circumstances, including a changing climate. Lessons from both similarities and differences across sites are drawn. This unique baseline study provides a wide range of indicators of activities and behaviors that will be monitored over time. We found that many households are already adapting to changing circumstances, and their changes tend to be marginal rather than transformational in nature, with relatively little uptake of existing improved soil, water and land management practices. There is a strong negative relationship between the number of food deficit months and innovation, i.e. the least food secure households are making few farming practice changes. This has very different policy and investment implications depending on assumptions made as to the direction of causality.     

Indigenous peoples’ fisheries and food security: a case from northern Canada

Indigenous peoples in northern Canada (at least the off-reserve part of the population) experience food insecurity at a rate which is more than double that of all Canadian households. The Cree community of Norway House in northern Manitoba, which harvests and consumes a great deal of fish, may be an exception and may offer some lessons. The objective of the paper is to address food security through the lens of local fisheries, both commercial and subsistence, of a northern indigenous community, and to develop an integrated approach to analyze food security. The approach uses Sen’s entitlement theory and the concept of food sovereignty. This mixed-methods research study employed questionnaire surveys among on–reserve commercial and subsistence fishing households, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and follow-up interviews for verification. During commercial fishing seasons (spring/summer and fall), fishers and their helpers share their fish harvest extensively through their families and communal networks, reaching almost half of the total population of the community. Such extensive sharing and the continuing community-based fishery have contributed to Norway House having more than 90 % food secure households, comparable to the Canadian average. Norway House may provide an example for other northern indigenous communities regarding food insecurity through use of fish and other traditional foods. The proposed integrated approach may be useful for analyzing food security in general.     

Application of the TOA-MD model to assess adoption potential of improved sweet potato technologies by rural poor farm households under climate change: the case of Kabale district in Uganda

Sweet potato technologies that increase productivity, such as drought resistant varieties and virus free planting material are being promoted in order to reduce the vulnerability of poor farm households to climate change. In this paper, the Trade-off Analysis, Minimum Data Model Approach (TOA-MD) was used to assess the adoption potential of these technologies by resource poor farmers under climate change in Uganda. The model was calibrated and validated using household survey data collected in 2009 from Kabale district. To simulate adoption potential, the base system data was generated from household data and adjusted to reflect impact of climate change on crop yields and prices by 2050. The percentage increase in yields resulting from the use of climate resilient sweet potato technologies were used to estimate yields for alternative systems based on the results from sweet potato trials by the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO), Uganda. Adoption potential of sweet potato technologies varied across altitudes. Compared with the high and lower altitudes, adoption potential is lowest at moderate altitude despite higher yields and lower costs of production. Paying farmers to adopt new sweet potato technologies is economically rational at the higher and moderate altitudes but not at the lower altitudes. The provision of free planting material (subsidy) for the evaluated technologies resulted in a modest increase of 2 % in adoption potential. Therefore, providing this as a way of increasing adoption of sweet potato technologies to reduce vulnerability of poor farm households to climate change will have a very small impact. Instead, climate change adaptation policy should focus on creating enabling environments for farmers to market their produce so as to raise returns and reduce the opportunity costs of climate change adaptation strategies.     

Challenges and possibilities for achieving household food security in the Western Sudan region: the role of female farmers

This paper investigates the role of women in achieving household food security in the Western Region of Sudan, an area much affected by the impacts of drought and civil conflicts. The study is based on a quantitative survey and qualitative focus group discussions, supported by personal observations made during fieldwork. Additionally, the study draws upon secondary data that is publicly available. Results demonstrate that women play a major role in producing and providing food for their households in this high-risk climate and conflict area, while men are more likely to migrate seasonally and even permanently. In addition, women are responsible for food preparation, processing, and food preservation and are wholly responsible for attending to household garden plots. They therefore contribute more to household food security than men, though this contribution is not recognized in official statistics. The study findings indicate that the main problems women face as food producers and providers are a lack of access to the full package of improved production methods (improved seeds, fertilizers, modern farming methods, credit services, pesticides, appropriate technologies, and marketing facilities), in addition to gender disparities and gender-biased traditions. The impacts of natural crises and civil conflicts are gendered and therefore the responses to these crises must be gender responsive. Holistic and strategic policies and plans that take gender issues into account are thus needed in order to achieve food security.     

Advancing human nutrition without degrading land resources through modeling cropping systems in the Ethiopian highlands

Food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa is generally considered a function of limited access to food, with little thought to nutritional quality. Analyzing household production of nutrients across farming systems could be valuable in guiding the improvement of those systems. An optimization model was employed to analyze the scenario of human nutrition and cropland allocation in enset (Enset ventricosum)/root crop-based and cereal-based systems of the Ethiopian Highlands. The type and amount of nutrients produced in each system were analyzed, and an optimization model was used to analyze which cropping strategies might improve the nutritional quality of the household using existing resources. Both production systems were in food deficit, in terms of quantity and quality of nutrients, except for iron. The energy supply of resource-poor households in the enset/root crop-based system was only 75% of the recommended daily dietary allowance (RDA) of the World Health Organization (WHO), whereas resource-rich farmers were able to meet their energy, protein, zinc, and thiamine demands. Extremely high deficiency was found in zinc, calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, which provided only 26.5%, 34%, 1.78%, and 12%, of the RDA, respectively. The RDA could be satisfied if the land area occupied by enset, kale, and beans were expanded by about 20%, 10%, and 40%, respectively, at the expense of maize and sweet potato. The cereal-based system also had critical nutrient deficits in calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, which provided 30%, 2.5%, and 2% of the RDA, respectively. In the cereal system, the RDA could be fully satisfied by reducing cropland allocated to barley by about 50% and expanding the land area occupied by faba beans, kale, and enset. A shift from the cereal/root crop-dominated system to a perennial-enset dominated system would decrease soil erosion by improving the crop factor by about 45%. This shift would also have a very strong positive impact on soil fertility management. However, any policy suggestions for change in cropland allocation should be done through negotiations with households, communities, and district stakeholders.     

Weed management in upland rice in sub-Saharan Africa: impact on labor and crop productivity

Rice is one of the most important crops for food security in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). There exists, however, a widening gap between its regional demand and supply. Competition from weeds is typically one of the major biophysical constraints in upland rice, frequently leading to significant yield losses and sometimes to complete crop failure, thereby threatening the food security of subsistence farmers. However, weed management practices that are currently employed to avoid such losses are associated with high weeding labor demands. This study examined the relationships between weeding times per farm, average time per hectare per weeding and rice yields of upland rice farmers in SSA, with the objective of estimating the impact of weeds on rural households’ economies in SSA reliant on upland rice production systems. To this end, we analyzed survey data collected from 992 farmers in four countries (Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo and Uganda). The counterfactual outcomes framework of modern evaluation theory was used to estimate the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) of the number of times a farm is weeded on weeding labor efficiency, as measured by the average number of hours spent per hectare at each weeding, and on crop productivity expressed as rice grain yield per hectare. A single weeding required 173 h per hectare, while weeding twice required 130 h per hectare per weeding (259 h per hectare in total) and weeding three times required 125 h per hectare per weeding (376 h per hectare in total). Correspondingly, a single weeding was associated with an average rice yield of 1.2 t ha^?1, weeding twice yielded 1.7 t ha^?1 and weeding three times yielded 2.2 t ha^?1. Compared to the situation where the farm is weeded only once and controlling for other factors, the model estimated yield gains of a second weeding to be 0.33 t ha^?1 and a third weeding to result in a gain of 0.51 t ha^?1. The estimated labor gains were respectively 64.2 and 68.1 h per hectare per weeding for a second and a third weeding. We conclude that weeding an upland rice crop more than once in SSA increases weeding labor efficiency by about 37 % and rice productivity by more than 27 %. Rather than motivating farmers to increase their labor inputs for manual weeding, however, we propose that more research and development funds should be devoted to developing, testing and promoting locally adapted strategies of labor-saving weed management in rice in sub-Saharan Africa. This will result in a significant contribution to regional food security and poverty alleviation.     

Evaluating the impact of improved maize varieties on food security in Rural Tanzania: Evidence from a continuous treatment approach

This paper investigates impact heterogeneity in the adoption of improved maize varieties using data from rural Tanzania. We used a generalized propensity-score matching methodology, complemented with a parametric econometric method to check the robustness of results. We found a consistent result across models, indicating that adoption increased food security, and that the impact of adoption varied with the level of adoption. On average, an increase of one acre in the area allocated to improved maize varieties reduced the probabilities of chronic and transitory food insecurity from between 0.7 and 1.2 % and between 1.1 and 1.7 %, respectively. Policies that increase maize productivity and ease farmers’ adoption constraints can ensure the allocation of more land to improved technologies and, in doing so, enhance the food security of households.     

Natural and socio-economic factors affecting food security in the Himalayas

In the Himalayas, food security of communities primarily depends on local agricultural productivity and food purchasing power. Subsistence agriculture, which is forest based, constitutes the main source of rural food and livelihoods. However, due to constraints of terrain and climate, agricultural productivity is low, resulting in large food deficits and leading to a considerable proportion of the adult male population migrating from the region in search of employment and livelihoods. Remittances from the migrants and local off-farm employment contribute to community purchasing power which may be used to buy food from the open market and government controlled Public Distribution System (PDS). Depletion of natural resources, changing climatic conditions, the recent economic recession and sharply fluctuating food prices have not only decreased local food production but also reduced employment opportunities locally as well as outside the area, rendering the entire region highly vulnerable to food insecurity. This study, which was carried out in the Upper Kosi Catchment in Kumaon Himalaya, India, revealed that not only has annual agricultural productivity declined by nearly 125 Kg per ha (25 %) during the last 30 years, causing an annual food deficit of 1883 tonnes (65 %) and massive decline in per capita food production, but that local off-farm employment opportunities in different traditional rural sectors has also declined. Furthermore, the recent economic recession and the resultant job losses for migrants has decreased incoming remittances by 20 %–25 %, causing the loss of local purchasing power and posing a serious threat to food security. Those particularly affected are marginal and smallholder farmers, and landless households, which mainly include socially backward communities and families with very low incomes. It is therefore imperative that a community oriented framework for the management of land, water and forest resources is planned and implemented in this region, together with the generation of viable means of off-farm employment at the local level