Acta Universitatis Danubius. Œconomica, Vol 15, No 7 (2019)

Abstract

Food insecurity is increasingly being recognized by many development economists, policy makers and policy analysts as both a policy and an economic problem. Arguably, an understanding of the determinants of food insecurity is critical for policy analysis and the design of effective food security strategies. Thus, this study examined the determinants of household food insecurity in Nigeria based on data from the 2009/2010 Harmonized Nigeria Living Standard Survey (HNLSS) obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics. Multinomial logit regression was employed to examine the determinants of household food security status. To derive food insecurity status, two objective measures of food insecurity were combined- household Food Expenditure(FE) and Dietary Diversity Score (DDS) to yield four possible scenarios viz., completely food secure; food insecure based on food expenditure only; food insecure based on dietary diversity score only; and completely food insecure households  The determinants of household food insecurity status showed that the odds ratio of households being food insecure relative to completely food secure increased significantly with household size, among rural households, among households in the northern region but decreased with higher income  and  improvement in educational status. This study therefore recommends that government should put in place policies that contribute to the earning capacity of the households. In addition, huge investment in agricultural sector in all the regions is needed to achieve local self-sufficiency in food production.