Investigating and Analyzing the Effects of Geographical Factors on Food Security in Rural Areas of Heris and Bostanabad Counties

Food security and nutrition are the main themes of national development that new attitudes, necessities and priorities have been revealed at the policy-making level and have become one of the challenges of the 21st century in recent years. The current study is practical and in terms of nature and methodology is descriptive and analytical. For collecting data, (questionnaire, interview, and observation) has been used. The context of study is Heris and Bostanabad Counties in East Azerbaijan city.Three factors were considered in selecting the sample villages in the above-mentioned cities; 1) Geographical distribution in rural areas, 2) Topographic factor and altitude, and 3) Number of rural population and households (villages with more than 50 households), and thus 18 villages from Bostanabad county and 10 villages from Heris county were selected for research. The statistical population consists of heads of rural households. The selected villages have a population of 26,087 people and 7,574 rural households, of which 392 households were selected using the Cochran's formula. In order to analyze the data, sample t-tests, SAW technique, Kendall, Kruskalovalis, etc. were used. The results showed that the status of all food security indicators (access, access, consumption method and stability) in the study area was evaluated favorably and the villages of Jigheh, shirvanehdeh and Charmkhurane-Sofla are in the first to third ranks in terms of food security and food security is high compared to other villages studied. Meanwhile, the villages of Khashndarq, Ein al-Din and Baroug are in the last ranks in terms of food security in the study area and in these villages, food security is low compared to other villages. Also, economic factor (income, employment, production, exploitation, economic diversification, etc.) has been identified as the most important factors in increasing food security in rural areas from the perspective of research respondents.