HOUSEHOLD FOOD SECURITY AND COMMERCIALIZATION AMONG SMALLHOLDER FARMERS IN KENYA

Lilian Kirimi, Raphael Gitau and Millicent Olunga

No 161445, 2013 Fourth International Conference, September 22-25, 2013, Hammamet, Tunisia from African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE)

Abstract: Commercialization is often viewed as an avenue to improve household food security due to its comparative advantages over subsistence production. However, there are arguments for and against smallholder commercialization as a pathway for ensuring household food security. This paper sought to identify factors that influence household food security for Kenyan rural smallholder households, and in particular, determine if household commercialization as defined by household participation in input (fertilizer and seed) and crop output markets affects food security position. Results showed that household commercialization was associated with a reduced risk of being in the chronically food poor and oscillator groups compared to the food non-poor group. Hence, market participation can play a significant role in reducing food poverty, thus ensuring food security. This suggests that facilitating the expansion of market participation by smallholder farmers can be critical in helping households transition out of food poverty. This will entail enabling access to affordable production inputs, suitable to small scale farmers, thus ensuring that farmers are not trapped in low productivity–low return farming activities that lead to food insecurity. The use of productivity enhancing inputs will improve the ability of smallholder farmers to produce sufficient marketable surplus. Also, it will be important to strengthen efforts geared toward creating market linkages for the various agricultural enterprises. Moreover, innovations that enhance households’ access to land, education, savings and employment can be instrumental in raising their ability to produce food and access it from the market, ensuring food security.

Keywords: Food; Security; and; Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/161445/files/L ... llicent%20Olunga.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:aaae13:161445

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.161445

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2013 Fourth International Conference, September 22-25, 2013, Hammamet, Tunisia from African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().