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

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.

Keywords:

• household resilience
• shocks
• food security
• principal component analysis
• energy crops
• treatment effect model

Acknowledgements

This article emanates from a dissertation in progress by Owen Y. Chamdimba, for a PhD in Agricultural Economics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments on the original manuscript. A vote of gratitude also goes to Mangochi RDP Agriculture staff for providing leadership in the organization of the data collection, all the enumerators, and the smallholders who patiently responded to all the questions which made this work possible. Finally, the authors thank BERL for allowing us to interview their farmers in the study area.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The biofuel from jatropha seeds is produced for domestic blending with diesel up to 8% and in paraffin used for lighting (Government of Malawi 2013).

2 The information collected on the recent shock in the previous 12 months was on year, severity, costs of the shocks (treatment/replacement/lost income), and coping mechanisms. It was not possible at that time to capture adaptation costs due to the complexity of the subject.

3 Tropical livestock unit is a widely used measure of livestock in equivalence of an animal of 250kg regardless of species. For more details see: http://www.fao.org/Wairdocs/ILRI/x5443E/x5443e04.htm.