About the book:

Sporadic cases of severe food insecurity and poverty in the arid and semi arid lands is an important concern to the Kenya Government This book dwells on econometric analysis of food insecurity using fuzzy theoretical framework and principal component analysis focused at the households in Baringo and West Pokot Districts of Kenya. A parallel analysis in Uasin Gishu, a non- arid region, was used for comparison. An analysis to investigate how fuzzy logics affect econometric estimates was also done. Based on the principal component analysis and fuzzy programming, results show that a reliable econometric analysis on food insecurity can be achieved if at least one variable from each of the following categories is used: Sustainability predictor variables such as yield per unit land or land arability, income related variables, education related variables, access and the role of markets, availability of infrastructure, health and water sanitation factors. It was also observed that fuzzy logics positively change residual variance, mahalanobis distances and collinearity such that econometric parameter estimation process of food security is somehow improved. The results further indicate that availability of roads, telecommunication, markets, income related variables and schools are important in influencing positive household food intake levels in Baringo and West Pokot Districts. Based on these results, food insecurity and other related phenomenon are probably analyzed well when fuzzy logics are used when considering other comparable methods. Since 82 % of the land area in Kenya have similar conditions as Baringo and West Pokot districts these results may be relevant for other parts of the country.