Assessment of food security situation among households in South Western Nigeria post-MDGs era

This study evaluated the level of millennium development goals (MDGs) in terms of hunger in south western Nigeria in addition to suggesting new innovative methods of food security assessment to contribute to the body of knowledge in reducing the controversies that have trailed the food security assessment over time. This study made use of multistage sampling techniques to select the households for the study. Primary data collected with the aid of structured questionnaires were used for this study to collect data from 161 households by interviewing the heads or appointed representative of the households who know about food supply to households and consumption by members. For the analysis, the study used descriptive statistics and econometric methods to analyze the data. Four models were specified with each model showing the determinants of food security according to food security indicator under consideration. The results of the study based on the analysis of the data has shown the percentage of food secure households in the study area as 53.6%, 77.6%, 39.8%, 32.9% and 28.6 according to food security based on recommended minimum daily per capita calorie requirement, household food expenditure share, self-report, US-HHFSS and coping strategies respectively. Furthermore, the study found those households living without children were more food secure than households living with children in the study area. However, the results of the study based on food insecurity showed that households showed more food insecurity with severe hunger based on US-HHFSS and coping strategies by 12.4 and 13 percent respectively than the remaining indicators used by this study. Moreover, according to combined assessment by using both qualitative and quantitative food security indicators, the results showed that 24.8 percent were food secure, 43.5 percent marginally food insecure and 31.7 percent severely food insecure. Seventeen variables in total were included in the four models out of which thirteen showed significant relationships with food security status of the households at various levels of statistical significance in different models where they were included. Based on the various results of food security status as presented by this study, it was concluded that food insecurity is still a major source of concern to households in the study area and could be life threatening in some cases considering the high prevalence of households that showed food insecurity with severe hunger in the study area. Consequently, far reaching policy recommendations were made the leading of which is economic inclusion that could guarantee accessibility of people not only to productive resources but at affordable rate with minimal bottlenecks, livelihoods diversification, improved access to public health care facilities, population control and development of functional database for the ease of collecting food security data for proper planning, execution and evaluation of food and agricultural related programmes.