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Food security in a remittance based economy

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Abstract

We interviewed 395 subsistence farming households from Chitwan, Nepal in order to identify the impact of remittances and other explanatory variables on child, adult, and household food security. The highest category of the IV - ordered probit regression models with cluster robust standard errors indicated that the food security status of households, adults and children was explained by gender and age of household head, adoption of conservation agricultural technology, number of fruit trees, and income from agricultural and livestock sources. Additional variables affecting only children’s food security were the adoption of hybrid rice or maize varieties and the wage income or salary earned within the district, whereas an additional variable affecting only household and adult food security was the wage income earned outside the district. Households receiving international remittances were more food secure than those households that did not receive such remittances.

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Notes

  1. Global Hunger Index (GHI) is calculated each year by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). GHI combines three equally weighted indicators: undernourishment, child underweight and children mortality and ranks countries on a 100-point scale where zero is the best (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.

  2. In this study “remittances” represents the “international remittances income” unless specified otherwise. Although we controlled for the “internal remittances income” to avoid any potential bias, the aim of our research was to understand the role of international remittances in food security in the international remittances based economy.

  3. Exchange rate U.S.$1 = NRs 98.28 (As of October 2, 2014).

  4. In 2014, two more municipalities (Khairahani and Chitrawan) have been added, taking the total number of municipalities in the district to four.

  5. High polychoric coefficients among three groups of food security indices indicate the need to estimate the model using a system of equations approach. However, we do not have unique variables for each food security groups. When explanatory variables are the same among three equations, there is no gain in efficiency by estimating the model in a seemingly unrelated fashion.

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Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank journal editor R. Strange and anonymous reviewers for constructive comments that helped to improve the quality of the manuscript. Partial support for this research was provided by the United States Agency for International Development. We thank Deborah Williams for collecting data used in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural Economics, Kansas State University, 400 Waters Hall, Manhattan, KS, 66506-4011, USA

    Madhav Regmi

  2. Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness, Louisiana State University (LSU) and LSU AgCenter, 225 Martin Woodin Hall, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Krishna P. Paudel

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  1. Madhav Regmi
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Correspondence to Krishna P. Paudel.

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Regmi, M., Paudel, K.P. Food security in a remittance based economy. Food Sec. 9, 831–848 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-017-0705-z

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