Abstract

S. Ndhleve, L. Musemwa and L. Zhou

Food insecurity is a challenge in rural South Africa. This paper employed descriptive statistics, household food accessibility index, and ordinal regression analysis on a sample of 159 randomly selected households to model the risk of inadequate access to food among households in a coastalrural community of Hamburg, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Data was collected using household questionnaire survey. Inadequate access to food is elusive across all the villages in Hamburg as an insignificant proportion of the respondents were reported to have adequate access to food. This study showed that 9% of the households experience severe inadequate access to food, while 78% have moderate access to food and 13% have access to adequate food. Various differences were noticed between the socio-economic statuses of the three groups. Following risk modeling criteria, inter-alia, purchasing food from the market, accessing food from the environment, income level, receiving social grants, having a professional job, owning a business and practicing farmers emerged as the major predictors of adequate access to food. The results reinforce the importance of social grants, promotion of small businesses, farming and continued support of rural education, and recommend them as important in improving food access in Hamburg community.