Entitlement to Food and Food Insecurity in Rufiji District, Tanzania

Although Tanzania is mainly an agricultural country and produces much food, there are certain districts where food insecurity is persistent. The general causes of food insecurity include use of low-level technologies. However, the extent to which lack of entitlements explains food insecurity is not known. We thus conducted a research in Rufiji District during the agricultural season 2005/2006 as a case study to: (i) determine the proportion of food insecure households; (ii) rank some indicators of entitlement vis-à-vis those of Malthusians’, Anti-Malthusians’, and Woldemeskel’s contentions with regard to their relationship with food security; and (iii) determine the correlation between the above indicators of entitlement and dietary energy consumed, which was the main indicator of food security in the research. We found that entitlement to food in terms of cash spent on buying grains was the factor most positively associated with food security. Its correlation with food security in terms of kilocalories consumed per capita per day was +0.803 and the correlation was significant at the 0.1% level of significance (p = 0.000). Based on the finding, it is concluded that food security in the district mainly depends on entitlement to food, particularly buying food. Therefore, the study recommends that, besides helping the citizens of the district use agricultural technologies to produce more food, efforts to improve food security should also support various non-farm income generating activities and livestock production to increase income that will help the people get more access to food through buying it