West African farmers are among the most food insecure globally and are threatened by climate change and a significant subsistence maize yield gap. Climate changes already hinder rural farmers’ abilities to adapt to food system changes, or their resilience to food insecurity. Understanding resilience to food insecurity more comprehensively requires studying one component at a time. The food use and access components are best studied at the household and community scales. This study answered the question: can understanding household agricultural food access (AFA) identify leverage points in an Indigenous community’s food system? If Indigenous communities support food systems studies, researchers must foster decolonized knowledge exchange and prioritize community needs. In this study, my long-term relationships in Bikotiba, Togo, fostered a decolonized assessment of AFA. Semi-structured interviews on AFA with 56% of households in 2018 led Indigenous Assistants and I to conclusions validated by the community. I conducted further dimension reduction analyses of the multivariate data—principal and mixed principal component, and multiple correspondence—culminating in eight related observed variables that could function as three lower dimensional representations of AFA. I used partial least squares path modeling to explore relationships between those observed variables and the unobservable AFA construct.
Results/Conclusions
Partial least squares path modeling weights and standard communalities, respectively, indicated that the actual area of crops a farmer in Bikotiba cultivates is less relevant to AFA than the choices farmers make, like whether to keep free grazing livestock for income security (0.33 and 0.45, respectively) or whether family members must sleep at the farms, up to 32 km away (0.37 and 0.55, respectively). Future stability studies would prove valuable to understanding whether these farming choices enhance or detract from the household’s food security. Ultimately, the story of maize subsistence in Bikotiba came to light. According to farmers’ interview responses, reliance on expensive chemical intensive maize in Bikotiba threatens long-term food access. We learned that maize production in Bikotiba is threatened by climatic, political, and environmental changes, making maize subsistence a glaring leverage point in the community’s resilience to food security; in addition to the social-political-economic and human rights injustices keeping rural farmers impoverished in Togo. This study demonstrated the cross-cultural possibilities to advance food systems research with Indigenous communities if Western scholars decolonize their approaches. This research is only possible if supported by communities like Bikotiba, and this study provided compelling insights on possibilities when communities support research.
