المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

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    • I have worked on the food security, vulnerability, and resilience of farm households in Ethiopia. While I was working, I came to know that resilience status of farm households to climate variability was really a surprise even to me. I defined resilience into seven components. As you might know, that resilience is not captured per se. Through the components, it is very easy to capture and measure the resilience status of farm households.

      Factors that make households resilient to shocks and stresses include social safety nets, basic services particularly public services, food and income access, agricultural productivity and production boosting technologies, asset and wealth accumulation mechanisms, adaptive capacity and the stability of the system for a certain time. These components are also latent variables which can not be observed per se; hence, collect variables that define the latent variables.

      When we talked about resilience, we need to see the possibilities to have well defining components in detail. Let me take one example that clearly defines how strong the components related to the resilience status of farm households in case of Ethiopia. Inter-household interdependence is high and therefore it is good for social protection and social safety nets program to flourish. This variable is one component among others that define resilience. Social lives interdependence encourages socio-economic and cultural protection that increase boldness of the communities and enable to build the strong bond among inter households who are members among themselves. Anything happens to one member of the group other members react very quickly to their members’ difficult situation.

      In my paper entitled “Econometric Analysis of Rural Households’ Resilience to Food Insecurity in West Shoa, Ethiopia” I found out that for instance social safety net increase the resilience of farm households. Informal social organization namely Equib and Eddir serve to tie social interaction and bond. Any non-member out of Equib or Eddir is isolated from the social interaction, ceremonies like wedding, farming activities, left to ditches, have no visitors when the family head/members are sick and remain poor.

      The wrong way to frame resilience brought about undesirable result. In any case, the time required to define resilience is crucial.