Households’ Food Insecurity in the V4 Countries: Microeconometric Analysis

Abstract

Food insecurity is a salient dimension of household poverty and a crucial issue viewed on a global or within a country level. It applies not only to less-developed countries, but also to countries of the European Union. In the European conditions, it implies that people affected by this problem cannot afford enough food of sufficient quality and quantity that would allow them to stay healthy and participate in the society. This paper attempts to fill that gap in the existing literature regarding food insecurity in the Visegrad Group countries. It aims to identify the factors affecting the occurrence of this phenomenon. In the empirical analysis based on the data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions Survey, logit models with country dummy variables are applied. The study shows that the households' food insecurity is associated with income, level of urbanisation, household type, disabilities of household members, and attributes of household head, such as educational attainment, gender, age, health and status of economic activity. Moreover, the findings strongly support the research hypothesis that the food insecurity profile exhibits country-specific effects. The results provide a much-needed baseline of evidence on food insecurity in the vulnerable households in the Visegrad Group countries.

Food Insecurity among Small-Scale Farmers in Poland

“…The empirical papers usually assume that food insecurity is determined by a wide range of factors. Among them, household income is expected to be strongly positively associated with access to food [11,17,21,38,48,[58][59][60][61]. Other research papers prove that a higher share (level) of off-farm incomes [60], remittance [58,62] and social grants [63] are significant for improving food security.…”

“…Polish households are also investigated by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) [47]. The households' food insecurity in Poland was analyzed by Dudek [48]. It was indicated that in 2017, 6.3% of the Polish population could not afford a meal with meat, chicken, fish (or vegetarian equivalent) every second day.…”

“…Some studies focus on the positive relationship between the age of the household head and food security [22,58,59,61,62,66] but some papers underline a negative relationship [65,67,68]. The households' food insecurity is also enhanced by a higher level of education of the household head [21,22,48,58,60,63,65,69]. In research where the role of family size [38,58,59,62,67,68,70] and the presence of children [11,13,17] were examined, the negative association was found.…”

Breaking food safety and quality standards in the EU: Financial aspects within poultry products manufacturers in Visegrad 4 countries

“…Review of a current state of the art using articles and studies of other authors point out at following factors within their influence on customer behaviour and preferences, namely the level of food literacy, product knowledge or purchasing power (Dudek, 2019;Erokhin, 2017;Ronto, Ball, Pendergast & Harris, 2016;Savelli, Murmura, Liberatore, Casolani & Bravi, 2019;Suchánek & Králová, 2019). Companies respond to these factors by identification of changes in established consumer behaviour in order to maintain their competitiveness that can be measured among all by financial performance indicators.…”

“…The reason for this situation can be found in the fact that prevailing amount of production, which is processed and placed on the market, is assessed as providing a lower utility value by the consumers' side. Dudek (2019) examined food insecurity in the EU, specifically in the V4. The author perceives food insecurity as a situation when people affected by this problem cannot afford enough food of sufficient quality and quantity that would allow them to stay healthy and participate in society.…”