Impact of climate variability on household food availability in Tigray, Ethiopia

Abstract

Background: Currently, climate variability is a hot issue across the globe, especially in countries where rain-fed agriculture is a means of livelihood. Climate variability increases the risks of hunger in the region as it affects all four components of food security: food availability, food accessibility, food utilization and food stability. Rainfall shortage or excess hampers food production in the region, causing food insecurity and escalating famine. Extreme weather is affecting people indirectly through the sequential rather direct depletion of their assets. Therefore, looking on the impact of climate on food security is crucial to build a sustainable production system. Results: Randomized data from 150 households were collected and analyzed using SPSS software. Household Food Balance Model analysis indicates that 15.7% of the households met the recommended daily calorie intake of 2100 kcal per adult equivalent/day, while 84.3% of the households fell below the daily recommended calorie intake. The average calorie intake of the households covers only 56.2%. Female-headed households are found to be more food insecure than their male counterpart. Those food insecure households use different coping mechanism to avert the shortage like daily laborer, reducing meal, borrowing, selling productive asset and switching meals. Moreover, the annual rainfall of a 20-year record averaged 725 ml (with a standard deviation of 6.7), with the minimum and maximum records at 354.5 and 1037 ml, respectively. Similarly, the average precipitation concentration index (PCI) stood at about 24.4 ml, recording a minimum and maximum PCI of 15.6 ml and 41.7, respectively. Finally, the coefficient of variability of rainfall variability is 0.16, which indicates the variation in inter-annual rainfall distribution is medium. Conclusions: The result shows a high prevalence of food insecurity in the rural community with high prevalence in female-headed household. Therefore, strong intervention is required by the government and should exhaustively work on promoting irrigation, providing credit to farmers and subsidizing farm inputs to improve food security in rural Tigray.