Assessment of Households’ Food Security Situation in Koutiala and San Districts, Mali

Abstract

Climate variability and change pose a threat to global food security around the world. This climate change results in the occurrence of extreme events such as droughts, flooding, etc. It becomes more pronounced in Mali. However, most Malian households are vulnerable to coping with the effects of those events. This climatic disturbance affects all sectors in Mali such as agriculture, livestock, etc. Thus, those sectors are the main sources of food production for many households in the country. In fact, several factors contribute to food insecurity in many areas of Mali including drought, flooding, low agricultural yield, terrorist attacks, and power instability. Among the affected areas in Mali, included Koutiala and San districts. The main goal of this study is to assess the level of households' food security status in the Koutiala and San districts. The specific objectives are: (i) to assess the households' food security index in the study area; (ii) to determine the main factors that drive the households’ to food insecurity; and (iii) to identify the households coping strategies to face food insecurity. Therefore, a field survey was conducted with a sampling of 455 households’ from eight (8) villages (M’Pessoba, TarassoII, Sougoumba, N’Tosso, Tene, Sourountouna, Koro, and Dieli) within Koutiala and San districts. Therefore, CARI (Consolidated Approach to Reporting Food Security Indicators) approach was used for measuring the household’s food security status. SPSS software was used for data processing. It appears from the findings that in the food consumption score, most of the households have an acceptable (99.8%) score and only a poor (0.2%) score. In the households’ food expenditure share, 100% of them spend less than 50% on food. The results (Table 3) show that (97.8%) of households are marginally food secured, only (2%) of them are food secured, and (0.2%) are moderately food insecure. The cows’ ownership and work for cash were the main factors of households’ food security which have a positive influence on households’ food security. The main constraints faced by households' food security were the increase in agricultural inputs price (91%), the difficulty of food availability (89.5%), an increase in food price (88.1%), rainfall variability (84.2%), income reduction (79.1%), debt payback (52.5%), effects of natural disasters (drought, flood) (50.8%), and human insecurity (46.4%). The food insecurity coping strategies based on food consumption were to borrow food (36%), reduce the amount of food consumed by adults to feed children (31%), reduce the number of meals per day (28%), use less popular and expensive foods (23%), limited the size of portions during meals (22%), and going a whole day without eating (9%). Moreover, the food insecurity coping strategies are based on households’ livelihoods, such as emergency (64.4%), crisis (33.6%), stress (1.8%), and none strategy (0.2%).