Agricultural Economics

Agricultural Economics

The Relationship between Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Households Food Security: A Case Study of Bostan Abad County

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors
Jabraeil Vahedi 1
Mohammad Ghahremanzadeh 2
Seyed Ali Hosseini Yekani 3
Hamid Sabeghi 4
1 Ph.D. Student in University of Tabriz
2 Professor in Agricultural Economics, University of Tabriz
3 Edith Cowan University, Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research
4 M.S. Graduated, Allameh Tabatabaei University
10.22034/iaes.2025.2054057.2111
Abstract
In this research, the household dietary diversity score (HDDS) has been used to calculate the food security status of households. To check the sustainability of agriculture, 20 activities that are known as sustainable agricultural operations in potato cultivation have been identified. Because the dependent variable in this study is count data, therefore, the Poisson model was used to investigate the factors affecting the HDDS and then machine learning algorithms were used to predict HDDS. According to the results, the average score of household dietary diversity is equal to 8.6 and it can be concluded that the farmers in Bostan Abad County have a good situation in terms of food security. Because sustainable agriculture can lead to the improvement of the farmer's income and purchasing power and increases the amount and variety of goods that he can buy. For example, due to the high rate of water evaporation in Iran, irrigation at night can improve the efficiency of water consumption and produce more crops per unit area by preventing water evaporation. Also the use of improved seeds and resistant varieties can reduce the consumption of inputs and production costs by increasing resistance to environmental stresses and bring higher yield to the product. The increase in expenses that the farmer spends on buying food for his family during the last week, increases the IRR of HDDS by 1.026 times. Obviously, the high amount spent on food can also increase the variety of food purchased by agricultural households. In the Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (ANN-MLP) algorithm, the fourth combination (scenario), i.e., the number of sustainable agricultural operations and expenses spent on food during the last week, with a determination coefficient of 0.56 and a dispersion index of 0.18, is the best possible scenario for predicting the household dietary diversity score of rural households in Bostan Abad County.
Keywords
Household Dietary Diversity Score
Food Security
Poisson Model
Machine Learning

Subjects

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