ISSN 2360-798X
Abstract
Accepted 21st December, 2015
The integration of nutrition into agricultural extension programs is increasingly used as a tool to curb food insecurity in developing countries. Inassessing the extent to which integrating nutrition into agricultural extension information and services affects smallholder household food security status in Bamboutos division, the household Food Consumption Score (FCS) was estimated and used as indicator for food security. Descriptive statistics tools and a multinomial logistic regression were used to analyse data collected from 150 randomly selected smallholder farmers receiving agricultural extension information and services. The results indicated that nutrition aspects are not adequately integrated into agricultural extension information and services in the studied area as only 45% of surveyed smallholders receive advices on nutrition from their extension agents. Also, judging from the FCS coefficients, 12.16% of the studied population are in state of food insecurity, 55.41% are vulnerable to food insecurity and 32.43% are food secure. The regression analysis revealed that integrating nutrition into agricultural extension information and services positively drive smallholder household food security status by improving on the FCS. Hence,nutrition aspect should be adequately integrated into the agriculture extension and education policies of the state as a tool for improving food security status in rural settings.
Keywords: Food security, Agricultural Extension Information and services, smallholder, food consumption score, Bamboutos,