The Impacts of Climatic and Non-Climatic Factors on Household Food Security: Study on Malaysian East Coast Poor

Abstract

Sustainable food security at household level is a national concern in many countries. The reasons for household food insecurity include social, economic, political, and personal factors as well as climatic changes and its outcomes. This research aims at finding out the linkage of the factors of climatic changes, non-climatic factors and household resiliencies with the level of household food security among the poor and low income households in Malaysia. This study is based on primary data that were collected in Jul-Oct 2012 through a questionnaire survey on 460 poor and low income households from the Pahang, Kelantan, and Terengganu States of Malaysia. The sample was selected from E-Kasih poor household database based on cluster random sampling technique. Initially the study measures household food security according to the USAID-HFIA model, and ran ordinal regressions under the logit and probit models. This study finds that household food insecurity is not only linked with social and economic factors, but also significantly linked with the climatic factors. Therefore, the food security programs need to be integrated with the adaption programs for climatic change.