Access to food What other policies are necessary to ensure
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Figure 2. Graduation pathways from Ethiopia’s Food Security Programme
Source: MOARD, 2009, p. 17.
In their critique of “graduation” approaches to social protection, Sabates-Wheeler and Devereux 2013 argue that poverty and food insecurity are caused not only by household-
level resource constraints but by deficits in the physical and economic environment including market failures, which requires interventions to address these structural
deficits, not only transfers of resources to food insecure households. More radically and controversially the Government of Ethiopia has implemented a Voluntary Resettlement
Programme for several years, which reflects an assumption that parts of the rural highlands are so densely populated and vulnerable to climate variability that the local population can
never achieve food security, and must therefore be assisted to move permanently to more favourable agricultural areas elsewhere in the country.
Graduation from the PSNP is defined as a movement by chronically food insecure households those that received food aid for the preceding three years to “food
sufficiency: A household has graduated when, in the absence of receiving PSNP transfers, it can meet its food needs for all 12
months and is able to withstand modest shocks” FSCB, 2007, p.
1. The difficulty of achieving “food sufficiency” – which could also be a proxy for “income security” – in a chronically food insecure context like Ethiopia is
revealed by the fact that only 56,895 households graduated during the PSNP’s first five-
year cycle MOARD, 2009, even though the objective was for all 8.3 million participants to graduate within five years, By contrast, according to government estimates, 91 per cent
of the 205,000 people who were voluntarily resettled between 2003 and 2010 achieved food sufficiency MOLSA, MOA and NSPP, 2011, p. 8.
One limitation of graduation-oriented programmes is that they implicitly assume that livelihood trajectories are linear, in the sense that injecting resources into poor households
will move them smoothly up the income ladder and out of extreme poverty and chronic food insecurity as the relatively straight line in Figure 3 suggests. But is this a realistic
assumption in a livelihood context that is characterised by highly variable and unpredictable levels of food production, prices and incomes?