Measuring Household Food Security based on Expenditure Surveys: Empirical Evidence from Gombe State, Nigeria

Abstract

Food security is one of the targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and it is widely considered a useful measure for evaluating the progress of a country in terms of wellbeing. Despite various concern by governments all over the world on ensuring that every household can at least provide three square meals per day, food insecurity continues to be a major development problem across the globe, undermining people's health, productivity, and often their very survival. Worldwide, approximately 840 million people are undernourished or chronically food insecure, and as many as 2.8 million children and 300,000 women die needlessly every year because of malnutrition in developing countries. Evidence suggests that Nigerians food production is increasing at less than 2.0% while population growth rate is estimated to be 2.5% per annum. The suggested theoretical disparity indicates that low rate of food production and high rate of population growth will generate high rate of food demand, thereby causing food Demand-Supply gap which can give rise to food insecurity. Thus, the study analysed household food security in Gombe State Nigeria using household expenditure and consumption surveys containing objective (quantitative) data. A total of 400 households were selected using multi-stage sampling and simple descriptive statistics and multivariate regression (probit model) were used.  The study revealed that on average, less than 50 percent of the households could afford to consume the minimum dietary requirement of2400kcal. Furthermore, the findings also showed that at least 27 percent of the household live below one Dollar (1$), 54 percent are fairly living on a dollar while only 19 percent live above one dollar. A number of factors such as assets, income, and occupation level of education indicators are correlated with perceptions of greater food adequacy.