Smallholders’ food security between farming and migration. Evidence from five Northern and Eastern African countries - INRAE - Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement
Conference Poster Year : 2023

Smallholders’ food security between farming and migration. Evidence from five Northern and Eastern African countries

Abstract

In developing countries, the relationship between migration, agriculture, and food security is characterised by complex feedback loops. In the absence of working markets, consumption and production decisions are inseparable. We develop a theoretical model where smallholders maximise food security by allocating labour to farming or migration, and farm production to self-consumption or sales, subject to remittance and farm production functions and a cash constraint. We estimate the model empirically by applying three-stage-least-squares to an original dataset of 5,300 crop and fish farmers from five African countries. We found that self-consumption improves food security, but larger benefits are generated by cash income, which in turn is positively related to sales. Reduction of household members through migra-tion improves food security but the impact of remittance investment is unclear, as confirmed by a propensity score matching analysis. Our findings suggest to prioritise cash crops, loss reduction, and productivity increase to invest labour off-farm.
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Dates and versions

hal-04187549 , version 1 (24-08-2023)

Identifiers

  • HAL Id : hal-04187549 , version 1

Cite

Simone Piras, Luca Mulazzani, Carla Barlagne, Susan Nchimbi Msolla, Akwilina Mwanri, et al.. Smallholders’ food security between farming and migration. Evidence from five Northern and Eastern African countries. Agri-food systems in a changing world: connecting science and society, Aug 2023, Rennes (FR), France. ⟨hal-04187549⟩
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