Correlates of farmers’ resilience to food insecurity in South-West Nigeria

Recently, many developing nations are disproportionately experiencing the impact of shocks and stressors compared to the rest of the world due to increasing inadequate capability and capacity to withstand the shocks. In particular, farmers and farming households are faced with diverse repeated and unanticipated shocks, which may be socio-economic, ecological and/or environmental in nature. All these shocks become unbearable and worsen in terms of food insecurity. The welfare costs associated with the shocks are significant, attracting humanitarian and development policy experts’ attention to developing suitable interventions to build a resilient food system and society. Consequently, this study analyzed the correlates of farmers’ resilience to food insecurity in South-West Nigeria. Drawing on the data collected from 472 smallholder farmers randomly sampled, descriptive statistics, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s food insecurity experience scale approach, composite score technique, principal component analysis (PCA) and Structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that more than half (55.3%) of the respondents were inadequate in almost all the resilience indicators and components, had low resilience capacity, and were vulnerable to food shocks and food insecurity. In comparison, only 7.8% have a high resilience capacity to be a buffer against food shocks. 54% of the respondents fall into a high food insecurity category, while only 1.9% fall into a very-low food insecurity continuum. The SEM analysis also revealed that social safety net (p<0.01), climate extreme events (p<0.01), access to essential services (p<0.01), presence of enabling institutional environment (p<0.01), and technical level (p<0.05) made direct impacts on the farmers’ food insecurity status. Conversely, possession of assets (p<0.01), and social capital/neighborhood effect (p<0.1) had inverse impacts on the farmers’ food insecurity status. The study recommended transparently implementing a social protection program to assist the farmer in building buffers against shocks. There is also a greater need for sustained investments across the resilience pillars and indicators to build farmers’ resilience capacity to food insecurity and other shocks.