Hunger in Madagascar: A Case Study

This paper is a continuation of a larger study which assesses hunger in African countries. The purpose of these papers in this is to look at the scope of hunger in countries and then to identify the factors that predict hunger in each individual country. This is the 5th paper in the series and is concerned with hunger in Madagascar, one of Africa’s and the world’s hungriest countries. The paper is important for several reasons. One is the fact that it, like all the country level papers, is based on a national probability sample, something the literature stresses is lacking and needed to improve hunger research. A second is that all the papers in the series, including this one, found that the literature’s suggestion that gender and the rural-urban dimension are significant predictors of hunger. These studies have provided a consistent list of significant hunger predictors. Employment in the country’s agricultural sector, wealth as measured by asset ownership, education and age were consistent significant predictors, .The surprising findings were related to respondent perception of the role of government in addressing hunger, questions like the way the government was handling whether people had enough to eat or addressing the living standards of the poor. The major policy implication of this and earlier papers is that governments need to reach out to citizens, presenting them with their food related plans and assuring them that the government is doing everything within its power to address hunger in their countries.


Introduction
This paper is a continuation of a larger project where the purpose is to demonstrate that existing survey research provides a means to assess the scope of hunger in African countries. Because this study reports on a project that generated national probability samples and utilizes a self-report www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/fsns Food Science and Nutrition Studies Vol. 4, No. 2, 2020 22 Published by SCHOLINK INC. measure to assess hunger, the results may be seen to reflect a country's total hunger level. That is because persons found in each country's sample might have been respondents that could have been enumerated in formal hunger statistics as well as unreported persons that reflect what is known as hidden hunger.

Hunger
Among the various meanings of hunger, one refers to the want or scarcity of food in a country, and it is in that sense that this note addresses hunger.

Hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa
As Clover (2004) has suggested, while the right to food is one of the most consistently acclaimed assertions in international human rights law, yet no other human right has been so frequently and spectacularly violated. Her discussion of food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa leads to the conclusion that hunger is a multi-faceted issue in Africa, and that just growing more food will not eradicate the problem. Agriculture is important and Clover points out that Africa has gone from being a key agricultural commodity exporter into being a net importer; the African continent now receives the most food aid. Perhaps the most important point Clover made was to suggest hunger will not be eradicated by just throwing money at the problem.

Hunger in Madagascar
Madagascar is one of the poorest and hungriest countries on the Planet.

Measuring Hunger
As Godecke et al. (2018) have indicated, measuring hunger remains problematic. This does not mean that hunger has been ignored. For example, there has been an effort in the research community to develop hidden hunger measures, indices and maps. These indices and mapping efforts have been productive and are useful here because they highlight the role of several important factors that are addressed in this paper. One of these is fact that African farmers may be hungrier than the rest of the population, and that gender may also be a significant factor, with women hungrier than men.
Both Godecke et al. and Muthayya et al. point to the lack of national probability samples as the primary hunger research roadblock in Africa. This study does use a national probability sample, with the objective being to identify policy related factors that possibly help alleviate hunger problems at the country level, Madagascar in this instance.

Data
The study's data source is the Afrobarometer Project, Round 6. The project

Measures
The study's questionnaire included what is called The Lived Poverty Index used in the Afrobarometer studies which was adopted from Mattes (2003). One of the five questions in the Index askes "over the past year, how often, if ever, have you or anyone in your family gone without enough food to eat".
Fixed responses to this question were: never, just once or twice, several times, many times, always.
These responses were coded as follows: Never = 1, just once or twice = 2 and many times and always = 3. These categories provide the basis for the ordered logistical analysis presented in the Results section.
The study's independent variables were basic socio-demographic variables included in the questionnaire and the significant factors that predicted hunger in the earlier papers. Each of these paper looked at hunger and the factors that predicted it at the country level. These countries were Burundi (Fry, 2017), Benin (Fry, 2018a), Zambia (Fry, 2018b) and Madagascar (Fry, 2020).

Results
This study's sole analytic procedure was to conduct an ordered logistical regression analysis and the results of that procedure appear in Table 1.   Table 1 shows that nine independent variables reached statistical significance in Madagascar's ordered logical regression analysis. This was to be expected in that most of the independent variables in the regression equation had been found to be significant predictors of hunger in the previous studies. Again, gender and the urban rural dimension were found not to be significant predictors. The ordered logical regression produced a pseudo R square of 09.

Discussion
As mentioned above, what is unusual about this Afrobarometer file is that it contains respondent surveys from some of the World's and Africa's hungriest countries, Madagascar is one of those nations, and the fifth country to be included in this series of papers; the others were Burundi, Benin, Tanzania, and Senegal. Perhaps what is most important about these earlier papers is that the two major factors identified in the literature as hunger predictors were not significant predictors in any of these countries, namely gender and the rural-urban dimension. A consistent set of predictive factors did emerge from this study. As expected, factors like poverty and employment in the agricultural sector were found to be consistent predictors of hunger, but the most striking findings were respondent's perception of the government's handling of food related problems, like assuring people have enough to eat, The major implication of this and earlier papers is that governments need to reach out to citizens, presenting their food related plans and assuring them that the government is doing everything within its power to address hunger in their countries.