Food Security and Resource Access: A Final Report on the Community Assessments in South Wello and Oromiya Zones of Amhara Region, Ethiopia

This paper examines aspects of severe food insecurity and resource access in 21 sampled communities of South Wello and Oromiya zones of Amhara Region. The information was collected by a multi-disciplinary team as part of a collaborative research project of the Institute for Development Research (IDR) of Addis Ababa University and the BASIS Horn of Africa Program. The research team conducted rapid community assessments from April to July 1999, in the midst of widespread and severe crisis culminating from repeated poor harvests and the failure of the year’s belg rains. These events had significantly enhanced peasant vulnerability to food shortages. The paper presents the perceptions of community members regarding interlinked aspects of production failures and food-insecurity, on the one hand, and resource access and coping strategies, on the other. Its intent is to provide an overview of key conditions and trends, rather than a comprehensive portrait of individual communities or the 1999 food shortage.