Does secured forest land tenure enhance forest dwellers' food security? Empirical evidence from West Bengal, India

ABSTRACT

Under the Forest Rights Act 2006, the government of India has recognised the Individual Forest Rights (IFR) of forest dwellers that formalise the de jure land tenure over forest land. This is expected to incentivise owners to invest and take better care of their forest land which, in turn, is assumed to improve households’ income and financial access and thereby reduce their food insecurity. Using the primary data collected from 300 IFR beneficiary households in Bankura district of the Indian state of West Bengal and the ordinal logistic regression model, this paper identifies and analyses the determinant factors influencing household food insecurity. Results show that larger IFR land size areas, higher education levels of the household head, and higher annual income are associated with a significant reduction in food insecurity. On the contrary, larger household sizes, higher dependency ratios, and the occurrence of crop damage are associated with a highly significant increase in food insecurity. Hence, it is suggested that in order to help reduce households’ food insecurity among forest dwellers in the state, the assignment of IFR land area of sufficient size to forest dwellers’ households may further be encouraged.

KEYWORDS:

• Households’ food security
• Forest Rights Act
• individual forest rights
• land tenure security
• livelihood
• West Bengal
• India

Acknowledgements

We are very thankful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, which helped to improve the paper significantly. We also thank the West Bengal Forest Department for permitting us to conduct research in our study area. We are also thankful to the local villagers who helped us in various ways during our field survey.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14728028.2023.2217838

Notes

1. FAO defined food security as a situation ‘when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’ (FAO 1996).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University Grants Commission