Household resilience to food insecurity and climate change in the central and northeastern regions of Tunisia: An empirical analysis

With a clear decrease in the agricultural households??? incomes, the increase of food and production factors prices, and the negative effects of climate change on agricultural production, smallholders??? farmers are facing food insecurity challenge, especially in arid regions. The objective of this paper is to examine the resilience of households to food insecurity and to identify the determinants of this resilience in two study areas: Kairouan (in the center) and Zaghouan (in the northeast). The study relied on a cross-sectional database collected from 671 smallholder farmers. Multivariate techniques including factor analysis and linear regression models were used to measure resilience and identify its determinants. The results indicate that the levels of vulnerability and resilience are different depending on the specificity of the region. In Zaghouan, 63% of agricultural households are vulnerable, 5.5% are moderately vulnerable, 3% are resilient and 28% of households are very resilient. On the other hand, 51% of households surveyed are vulnerable in Kairouan, about 3% are moderately vulnerable, 4% are resilient and 42% of households are very resilient. The results reveal that the most important determinants of household resilience to food insecurity and climate change are ???income and access to food???, ???ownership of assets???, ???access to basic services??? followed by ???adaptative capacity???, and ???Social Safety Networks???. The ???climate change??? negatively affect household resilience and should be further investigated in the long term. Interventions must target strategies that address the different levels of resilience reflected by the resilience estimators. These es-timators were generated by focusing mainly on building farmers??? knowledge of how to face the different difficulties and challenge.