Abstract
West African farmers are among the most food insecure in the world and are threatened by climate change, environmental degradation, population growth, globalization, poverty, and political and economic instability. These threats hinder rural farmers’ abilities to adapt to food system changes, or their resilience to food insecurity. If Indigenous communities, with centuries of traditional farming and ecological knowledge, support research of their food systems, a researcher must foster ethical, decolonized knowledge exchange and prioritize community needs. In this study, my long-term relationships in Bikotiba, Togo, fostered a participatory study of household agricultural food access (AFA) and related community food security tipping-points. Semi-structured interviews with 56% of household heads in Bikotiba in 2018 led Indigenous Research Assistants and I to conclusions validated by the community. I conducted further data reduction techniques and statistical analyses, culminating in a group of eight related observed variables that could be combined to function as three lower dimensional representations of AFA. Further, I used partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) to explore relationships between the observed data and the unobservable AFA construct. PLS-PM indicated that the quantity of different crops farmed contributed less to AFA than choices, such as whether to keep livestock. Further, our study provided critical insight to challenges with the primary subsistence crop yield gap, maize, which will be critical as climate threats mount. These results pave the way for future participatory food system studies, including foci on maize monocultures, documenting Indigenous agricultural histories, quantifying agricultural labor, farmer decision making, nutrition, and more.
Presenters
Katryna KiblerPhD Editor/Writing Coach, The Writers' Exchange at Antioch University, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Food Production and Sustainability
KEYWORDS
Agriculture, Food Supply, Climate Change, Decolonization, Food Security, Participation
