Ranking and relationship of agricultural credit with food security: A district level analysis (original) (raw)

Cogent Food & Agriculture

Agriculture sector is back bone of agrarian economies and it is the primary source of food in these economies like Pakistan. Current situation of Pakistan's economy highlighted that agriculture sector contributes the 19.8% share to GDP and provides 42.3% of the total work force. There is a lot of empirical work which focus on consistent expansion of agriculture output. Food production in agricultural economy require bundle of resources but credit is one of the factor which help in risk aversion and risk Management. The one of the major problem faced by the farmers is the shortage of credit availability. Therefore, this study has been devised to observe the impact of institutional and non-institutional agricultural credit on the level of food security in the districts of Punjab province of Pakistan. In this regard multiple linear regression models are rendered to quantify the relationship between food security (i.e. Food Insecure Population, Food Availability, Food Access and Food Absorption) and Agricultural Credit (i.e. Overall Agricultural Credit, Institutional Agricultural Credit and Non-Institutional Agricultural Credit). The study find that Institutional Agricultural Credit is significantly helping in combating food insecurity while Non-Institutional Agricultural Credit shows unexpected results. Therefore it is strongly recommended to cates institutional credit to reduce food insecurity issues in the country.