Food security status and coping strategies among small-scale crop farmers in Volcanic Highlands in Rwanda

This paper aims to determine the level of food security of small-scale crop farmers and to identify coping strategies for food security mostly adopted by small-scale crop farmers in the Volcanic Highlands in Rwanda. Data were collected using a questionnaire administered to a random sample of 401 small scale crop producers in the study area. CARI approach and descriptive statistics were used to analyse data. This methodology was chosen by the fact that it enables to have disaggregated food security indicators. Results show that 86.61% of the sample households are food secure, while 13.39% are food insecure. These results also indicate that spending savings is the most adopted stress-coping strategy among the livelihood-based coping strategies. The most adopted among consumption-based strategies are relying on less preferred or less expensive food, and reducing the quantities consumed by adults for children. The overall CARI console analysis shows that the majority of the sampled households are not food insecure, i.e. they are not vulnerable with respect to adopted strategies to cope with food shortage. Therefore, it is recommended that strategies should be initiated to increase crop productivity and output, to guarantee market access to small-scale farmers for stable agricultural prices and farm incomes, to enhance the livelihood diversification to cope with under-employment in the agricultural sector to benefit rural non-farm sources and to complement farm incomes.