Sassi Maria, Trital Gopal
Department of Economics and Management, University of Pavia, Via S. Felice, 5-27100, Pavia, Italy.
Food Secur. 2022;14(1):111-125. doi: 10.1007/s12571-021-01200-9. Epub 2021 Jul 17.
The increasing complexity of food insecurity, malnutrition, and chronic poverty faced by Sub-Saharan Africa warrants urgent categorisation and tracking of household food security along both temporal and spatial dimensions. This will help to effectively target, monitor and evaluate population-level programs and specific interventions aimed at addressing food insecurity. Traditional longitudinal analysis does not address the dynamics of inter- and intrahousehold heterogeneities within the seasonal and spatial context of household-level food security. This study is the first to overcome such limitations by adopting a multi-group piecewise latent growth curve model in the analysis of the food security situation in a statistically representative sample of 601 households involved in subsistence and cut-flower commercial agriculture, around Lake Naivasha. We considered food security as a latent concept, which manifests as food security outcomes in our primary longitudinal dataset from March 2018 to January 2019. Our analysis highlights the temporal and spatial dynamics of food security and advances new evidence on inter- and intrahousehold heterogeneities in food security across different seasons for the subsistence and commercial farming clusters. These heterogeneities were demonstrated primarily during the hunger season from March to June, and persisted in both the clusters and across months, albeit with different intensities. Moreover, our results indicate the importance of commercial agriculture in achieving food security in the hunger season. Our study suggests the need of a multidisciplinary approach to food security and the introduction of well-coordinated interventions for the development of subsistence and commercial agriculture considering the seasonal and cluster-level specificities.
撒哈拉以南非洲面临的粮食不安全、营养不良和长期贫困问题日益复杂，因此迫切需要从时间和空间维度对家庭粮食安全进行分类和跟踪。这将有助于有效地确定目标、监测和评估旨在解决粮食不安全问题的人口层面项目和具体干预措施。传统的纵向分析并未涉及家庭层面粮食安全的季节性和空间背景下家庭间和家庭内异质性的动态变化。本研究首次通过采用多组分段潜在增长曲线模型，对纳库鲁湖周边601户从事自给农业和切花商业农业的具有统计学代表性样本的粮食安全状况进行分析，克服了这些局限性。我们将粮食安全视为一个潜在概念，在我们从2018年3月至2019年1月的主要纵向数据集中，它表现为粮食安全结果。我们的分析突出了粮食安全的时间和空间动态，并为自给农业和商业农业集群在不同季节粮食安全方面的家庭间和家庭内异质性提供了新的证据。这些异质性主要在3月至6月的饥饿季节表现出来，并在两个集群以及不同月份持续存在，尽管强度不同。此外，我们的结果表明商业农业在饥饿季节实现粮食安全方面的重要性。我们的研究表明，需要采取多学科方法来解决粮食安全问题，并考虑到季节和集群层面的特殊性，引入协调良好的干预措施来发展自给农业和商业农业。
