ANNOUNCEMENTS
This study is conducted in Bezo community in Southern Nations, Nationalities and People‟s Region in Ethiopia, with specific objectives of assessing the dietary diversity and economic access to food, and understanding determinants of food security in the community. The paper has used both secondary and primary data in general, while specific methods such as house-hold dietary diversity score was used in data collection and analysis of the dietary diversity intake, which was also used as a proxy indicator of the food security of the households. To understand the determinants of food security, logistic regression model is used as the food security situation of the community as binary dependent variable is expected to be either food secure or food insecure.
The study indicates about 65.6% of the Bezo community were not consuming diversified food types. Thus, with the strict sense of the results of the household dietary diversity score, the 65.6% of the community are considered as food insecure, while 50% of the households have no economic access to food, as the measure of the Z-score of the HDDS indicated. The logistics regression model showed, among the sixteen independent variables considered, family size, livestock ownership, use of improved agricultural inputs and effects of weather variability and precipitation shortage have shown significant association with food security of the households. Unlike the results of other empirical studies, in this study, the association between family size and food security was positive. Normally, family size shows negative association with food security. The case in this study, could be due to two reasons. On one hand, younger households have no adequate access to essential livelihood assets; and on the other hand, in areas close to pastoral livelihood system, there is a higher tendency to have a larger family size, which usually is dictated by relatively better socioeconomic position of a given household.
Development actors need to consider the factors most influencing food security in integrating them in food security policy initiatives and food security program interventions.
Key Words: Food Security, Household Dietary Diversity Score, Determinants of Food secu-rity.
