Impact of adopting the climate-smart crop varieties on food security in southwestern Ethiopia

Climate-smart crop varieties (CSV) are vital in improving food security by enhancing productivity while reducing problems of climate change. However, there is a low adoption of these varieties by the farmers in the study area due to lack of awareness of their impact on food security. Therefore, this study was designed to analyze their impact on food security in southwestern Ethiopia. The data were collected from 385 randomly selected sample households using a semi-structured questionnaire. Both descriptive and econometric analyses were used to analyze the data. The propensity score matching (PSM) model was used to evaluate the impact of climate-smart crop varieties on food security. Descriptive analysis showed that about 59.74% of the respondents were adopters of climate-smart crop varieties. The PSM analysis result revealed that the adoption of climate-smart crop varieties had a significant positive impact on food security. This implies that the likelihood of being food secure would increase by a factor of 0.8 if the climate-smart crop varieties were adopted. Therefore, developing and disseminating the climate-smart crop varieties at the right time through educational improvement (strengthening collaboration) and allocating land for their development is suggested for policymakers to improve food security.