Resilience to shocks and food insecurity: Determinants, and the impact of smallholder jatropha curcas cultivation in Southern Malawi

Owen Y. Chamdimba, Gerald F. Ortmann and Edilegnaw Wale

African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, 2021, vol. 13, issue 5, 619-633

Abstract: This paper studied household resilience to food insecurity, its determinants, and the impact of shocks on welfare in Southern Malawi. The resilience concept is evolving. A crucial issue in scholarly and policy space is how it is measured. This paper proposed an aggregated index measure and empirically tested it to study determinants as well as the impact of jatropha cultivation on resilience to food insecurity. The study used a unique cross-sectional dataset of 298 smallholders which included 100 jatropha cultivating farmers, collected using purposive and random sampling strategies. The resilience index was a good predictor of household welfare. Empirical evidence showed that shocks, various capital assets and institutional factors were significant determinants of resilience to food security. Jatropha cultivating farmers had less resilience capacity to food insecurity than their counterparts. The study did not find any evidence to support the notion that jatropha cultivation significantly influenced resilience to food insecurity.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20421338.2020.1774962 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rajsxx:v:13:y:2021:i:5:p:619-633

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rajs20

DOI: 10.1080/20421338.2020.1774962

Access Statistics for this article

African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development is currently edited by None

More articles in African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().