Food Security among Male and Female-headed Households in Eden District Municipality of the Western Cape, South Africa

Abstract

This paper examined food security status among male and female-headed farming households in Eden District Municipality, Western Cape, South Africa. Simple random sampling was used to select 31 male and 19 female headed-farming households. A structured questionnaire was used for data collection while Mann-Whitney U and Wilcoxon test were used to determine differences in food security status among the two groups. The result showed that 58 percent of the females were between 41-50 years and 42 percent of the males were above fifty years of age. About 77 percent of male and 64.4 percent of female headed households had between 2 to 4 years farming experience. A significant difference exists in food security status (Z = 2.115, p 0.34), with higher mean rank for males (28.44) and females (20.71). Both household heads indicated that poor storage, poor market, la ck of credit and land tenure highly affects their household food security.