Determinants of food security in Southern Ethiopia at the household level

Abstract In the early 1980s, a paradigm shift occurred in the field of food security, following Amartya Sens (1981) claims that food insecurity is more of a demand concern, affecting the poor's access to food, than a supply concern, affecting availability of food at the national level. Despite the wide acceptance of Sen's thinking, many controversies including the relative importance of supply‐side versus demand‐side variables in causing and solving food insecurity have remained in academic and policy circles. This study develops a recursive household food security model within the framework of consumer demand and production theories following Singh et al. (1986) , and parses out the relative importance of supply‐side versus demand‐side variables in determining household food security in southern Ethiopia. Based on results of a test of full/reduced model and the magnitude of changes in conditional probabilities of food security, we conclude that the supply‐side variables are more powerful determinants of food security than the demand‐side variables.