Assessing The Food Security Status Of Smallholder Farm Households In The Northern Region Of Ghana

ABSTRACT 

Smallholder farmers play a vital role in food production especially through subsistence farming. However, their households are major casualties of food insecurity despite their efforts in food production. This study seek to assess the food security status, factors influencing household food security status and coping strategies used among smallholder farm households in West Mamprusi (WMD) and Mamprugu Moaduguri (MMD) Districts in the Northern region of Ghana. The study used the COC, HDDS and HFCS methods to explore the food security status of households in the study area. Additionally, the logit model was used to determine the factors that influence household food security whiles the the kendall’s coefficient of concordance was used to identify and rank the copping strategies used by households in the study area. A multistage sampling technique was used to select the respondents that were interviewed. In all, 200 smallholder farm households were interviewed to collect data for analysis. Mean farmland sizes was 3.49 acres, the major months of adequate and inadequate household food provisioning were August to November (44%) and May to July (54%) respectively. The study revealed that about 52% of households in the study area was food secure. The Binary Logit Model (BLM) revealed that Locality, sex, education and access to employment had positive relationship to household food security whiles household size and marital status had negative relationship to food security status of households. Reducing the expenditure on the household to the minimum to buy food, consuming less food within meals, reducing number of meals per day and consuming low quality and cheaper food were the coping strategies adopted by households in the study area to mitigate the effects of food insecurity. The study recommends that development partners in food security should launch education programmes on nutrition especially on the different food groups and dietary diversity practices among the smallholder farm households. This will re-orient their daily diets towards the consumption of a more diversified diet.