''Let them eat macaroni!'' Food security and the importance of teff in Addis Ababa

Abstract

This research is concerned with urban food security in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Traditionally food security research has mainly been focussed upon rural areas, endorsing small-holder farmer productivity (Crush and Frayne, 2011). It is largely recognized that such focus upon small-holder farmer availability of food is ignoring the multidimensional nature of food security. Therefore, the FAO Food Security Programme (2008) has proposed here a food security framework that takes into account multiple aspects of food security: availability, accessibility, utilization and stability. Others endorse more explicitly the social aspect the social and cultural value of food (Ingram, 2011). This research adopts such all-encompassing approach to the case of teff in Ethiopia. Results are twofold. First, it was found that the government of Ethiopia continuous to endorse the availability aspect of food security, resulting in false assumptions about future food security and the production of teff. Second, the literature on the case of teff is also ill-informed, rather approaching teff in terms of accessibility, ignoring the social and cultural value of teff in Ethiopia (Demeke and Di Marcantonio, 2013) (Minten et al., 2013).