Modeling Food Security Status among Beans and Maize Farming Households in Uganda

Food security, a key dimension of household welfare, reflects a household’s ability to access sufficient, safe, and nutritious food for an active and healthy life. Understanding its determinants is vital for informing agricultural and social protection policies that enhance livelihoods and resilience among subsistence farmers. Modeling discrete response variables with an excess of zeros, such as household food security scores, requires an approach that accounts for overdispersion while utilizing the full data distribution.This study employed the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) to assess food security status among bean and maize farming households in Uganda. The HFIAS, a standardized nine-item tool developed under the USAID Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) project, captures experiences related to food anxiety, inadequate food quality, and insufficient quantity within the previous 30 days. While other measures, such as the food consumption score (FCS) and household dietary diversity score (HDDS), are widely used, the HFIAS offers an experience-based, access-focused perspective suitable for household-level policy analysis.Using secondary data from the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) Impact Evaluation Survey (n = 1,445), a zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression model was applied to identify factors associated with household food security at the 5% significance level. Model diagnostics, including the Vuong test, link specification test, residual analysis, and goodness-of-fit tests, confirmed model robustness and reliability.Findings, presented as incident rate ratios (IRRs) with 95% confidence intervals, revealed that marital status, region, farm size, fertilizer use, improved crop varieties, credit access, education level, and farmer group membership significantly influenced food security outcomes. Being married (IRR = 1.22) or widowed/divorced (IRR = 1.33), residing in Eastern (IRR = 1.17) or Western (IRR = 1.24) Uganda, and having at least primary education (IRR = 0.84) were associated with greater food security.The study concludes that targeted, literacy-sensitive agricultural interventions, expanded credit access, stronger farmer groups, and region-specific strategies are crucial for addressing food insecurity among smallholder farmers. Special support for farmers with little or no formal education, through practical agricultural training and extension services, combined with financial inclusion and region-tailored programs, can strengthen household resilience and guide food security policy.