Abstract
Niger is a landlocked country where
rainfall is characterised by high inter-annual and spacetime
variability. It faces many natural and human constraints that explain
the erratic evolution of its agricultural production. In addition, since
signing the African Union Maputo Declaration of 2003 of keeping
expenditure on agriculture to at least 10% of the national budget, Niger
has surpassed this share, however, the problem of food security still
lingers. Hence our research topic: Households’ Resilience to Food
Insecurity and Adaptation Strategies to Climate Change in Niger.
Therefore,
this study focuses on two major themes: resilience to food insecurity
and adaptation strategies to climate change. To address these themes,
the following approaches are used: principal component analysis,
structural equation modelling, ordered probit model and multivariate
probit model. Principal component analysis (PCA) is run on five
household level variables (income, food expenditure, duration of grain
held in stock, livestock units owned by the household calculated as
Tropical Livestock Units and number of farms exploited) to create the
resilience index. Data from the 2010 National Survey on Households’
Vulnerability to Food Insecurity done by the Niger National Institute of
Statistics on 9354 rural households is used. The results show that
households from Diffa, Dosso, and Tillabery regions are the most
resilient to food insecurity, compared to those from Maradi, Tahoua,
Zinder, and Niamey. The index shows also that female-headed households
are less resilient to food insecurity than maleheaded ones.
To
analyse factors affecting households’ resilience to food insecurity,
structural equation modelling is used and the results show that Asset
and Social Safety Nets indicators have a positive and significant impact
on households’ resilience to food insecurity, while the climate change
indicator approximated by long-term average rainfall has a negative and
significant effect.
To identify factors affecting rural
households’ food security status, an ordered probit model is used and
the dependent variable is a proxy indicator of food security, namely the
Food Consumption Score. The results show that the likelihood of change
in the food security status of a household is determined by the sex of
the head of the household, livestock ownership, long-term climate
(rainfall and temperature), duration of grain held in stock, household
income and migration of household member.
This study also
identifies factors affecting farm households’ adaptation strategies to
climate change using the 2011 Niger National Survey on Living Conditions
and Agriculture executed by the National Institute of Statistics. The
results of the multivariate probit technique show that there is a strong
complementarity between practices, and the cross-technology correlation
may have important policy implications in that a policy change that can
affect one agricultural practice can have spillover effects on other
practices. The results also show that higher long-term mean rainfall and
higher maximum temperatures increase adoption.
Moreover, the
study shows the importance of climate variables, biophysical,
institutional, infrastructural and socio-demographic characteristics in
the choice of adaptation strategies. The importance of system-level
variables on adoption suggests the need for strengthening local
institutions to sustain agricultural practices. Notably, these results
indicate that to strengthen households’ resilience to food insecurity,
there is a need to help them to gather more resources in order to
acquire more assets. They also need assistance through social safety
nets, especially for women. In addition, it is suggested that the
Government should establish efficient early warning signals that could
alert households so as to prepare for the uneven events.