Vulnerability of smallholder rural households to food insecurity in Eastern Ethiopia

Although several empirical methodologies as to how best assess vulnerability to food insecurity have been proposed in the literature, none of these has evolved into a unanimously accepted approach. This article contributes to this literature by adapting the Vulnerability as Expected Poverty approach from poverty analysis methodology with the aim of scrutinizing factors determining household level vulnerability to food insecurity based on cross-section data collected from 277 randomly selected households in eastern Ethiopia. Vulnerability to food insecurity was strongly associated with several factors which included family size, size of cultivated landholding, soil fertility status of plots, access to irrigation, number of extension visits, use of fertilizer and improved seed. The probability that any given household's food consumption expenditure would fall below a specified cut-off level has also been computed and vulnerable households identified. The total number of vulnerable households (111) was found to be greater than those who are currently food insecure (103). This implies that design and implementation of food security policies and strategies need to focus not only on those who are observed to be currently food insecure, but also on setting up social protection mechanisms to help prevent households from falling more deeply into food insecurity in the future.