1. Research interested
○ Food Security, Agricultural Cooperation in Myanmar
2. Article/ Journal
○ The Role of Landholding as a Determinant of Food and Nutrition Insecurity in Rural Myanmar /World Development
3. Presenter
Byoungkyun Jeon
4. When
○ 2018.07.11 (Wed) ? 12:00~13:30
5. Where
○ Seminar room 406, Graduate School of International Agricultural Technology
6. Main contents
○ The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines food and nutrition security (FNS) as a population’s “physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”
○ The most recent FAO national assessment suggests that at least 20% of the Myanmar population is undernourished
○ We use data from rural Myanmar to empirically analyze the links between land holdings and household level food and nutrition security.
○ The data for our analysis come from the 2011?2012 Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund (LIFT, 2012) dataset which includes a sample of 4,000 households across 252 villages.
○ This paper focused on the following issues:
(a) What are the socio-economic characteristics of food insecure households?
(b) What are the main coping strategies adopted by vulnerable households to address their food security?
(c) Are our findings robust across the different food security measures?
7. Method-used
○ Probit model on the ability of households to meet their hunger needs.
(i) ‘change food’ = 1 if the respondent felt that they needed to change their diet to cheaper/less preferred foods in the last 4 weeks due to food shortage
(ii) 'reduce food’ = 1 if the respondent reported that the household needed to reduce the size/frequency of meals in the last 4 weeks due to food shortage
(iii) ‘shortage’ = 1 if the household experienced a food shortage
(iv) ‘hunger’ = 1 if in the last 4 weeks any member of the household had gone for night and day without food; or if there had been no food in the house; or if a member of the household had gone to bed hungry; or if there was a need to increase the consumption of wild food
(v) ‘borrow’ = 1 if the respondent reported that in the last 12 months, the household needed to borrow food or money for food from relatives, friends or neighbors, money lenders, loans associations, banks, traders, or shop keepers
○ Probit model on dietary diversity.
- Five food-group categories to construct our dietary diversity score: carbohydrates, vegetables, protein, dairy, and other (which includes snacks, condiments, salt, etc)
- DDS = 2 if it consumed at least one food from two different food groups and zero otherwise
- DDS = 3 if it consumed at least three of the food items and zero otherwise
- Variable DDS has a natural ordering with DDS = 2 being the worst outcome and DDS = 5 being the best outcome. More formally, we assume four categories: DDS = 2, DDS = 3, DDS = 4; and DDS = 5.
○ Probit model on food groups
- The variable ‘Vegies’ = 1 if the household reported consumption of vegetables the previous day, 0 otherwise, and ‘protein’ and ‘dairy’ are defined in a similar way.
8. Results
<Food insecurity>
○ Economic factors such as a household’s landholding status and income source are good predictors of a household’s food security status.
○ In particular, landholding is statistically significant at reducing the probability of a household being hungry as measured across all five food security indicators.
○ Land ownership to be associated with a household having zero months of inadequate food (completely food secure), and reducing the probability of inadequate food.
<Dietary diversity>
○ A positive association between the size of landholdings and dietary diversity.
○ A household with more than 10 acres of land has a 15.6 percentage points higher probability of having high dietary diversity (DDS = 4).
○ These results are also echoed in the ordered probit results, where having land holdings greater than 10 acres is statistically significant at increasing the probability of the household being in the highest dietary diversity category (DDS = 5) by 2.5 percentage points, and of being in the DDS = 4 category by 11.7 percentage points.
<Food groups>
○ Land ownership is statistically significant and positively associated with the consumption of protein, while having no statistically significant relationship with the consumption of vegetables or dairy.
○ Relative to a landless household, an increase in land size monotonically increases the probability that the household will consume protein.
9. Conclusions
○ Landless and near landless households are unable to meet their FNS needs, as indicated by their self-reported FNS indicators and the lack of dietary diversity.
○ Landed households (particularly those owning more than 10 acres of land), are significantly more likely to have zero months of inadequate food, do not have to resort to coping strategies such as reducing the size/frequency of meals, or borrowing to meet their FNS.
○ Landholding to be a strong predictor of household food and nutrition security.