Exploring the association between agricultural production systems and household diets in Viet Nam.

The government of Viet Nam promotes an integrated and diversified production system that focuses on the symbiotic relationship of livestock, aquaculture, and fruits and vegetables (F&V), locally known as Vuon Ao Chuong (VAC). The expectation is that this system can prevent soil degradation, while improving dietary quality and income. This study examines the correlation between VAC production systems and diets using cross-sectional data from the 2016 round of the Viet Nam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS). Using ordinary least squares, we model four continuous outcome variables related to quantity consumed of fruits and vegetables, fiber, animal protein, and dietary energy; while using logistical regression, we model three indicator variables related to whether diets are balanced in terms of intake of dietary energy derived from carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. While individual components of VAC, such as aquaculture or F&V production, show a positive correlation with one or more dietary indicators, adoption of the full VAC system is found to be positively correlated only with dietary fiber consumption, making it challenging to establish a causal link between system adoption and improved dietary quality. However, we find that several socioeconomic variables, such as access to markets, household wealth, education of the household members, and household size are positively associated with one or more dietary indicators. Further research is needed to establish strong and causal relationships, or lack thereof, between VAC system and diets by exploiting the panel structure of VHLSS to examine the role of VAC in improving nutritional outcomes in Viet Nam.

Plant different, eat different? Insights from participatory agricultural research.

We examine the association between on-farm production diversity on household dietary diversity in Malawi using microdata collected as part of an environmentally sustainable agricultural intensification program. The program primarily focuses on the integration of legumes into the cropping system through maize-legume intercropping and legume-legume intercropping. Relative to staple cereals such as maize, legumes are rich in micronutrients, contain better-quality protein, and lead to nitrogen fixation. Given the systematic difference we document between program beneficiaries and randomly sampled non-beneficiary (control) households, we employ causal instrumental variables mediation analysis to account for non-random selection and possible simultaneity between production and consumption decisions. We find a significant positive treatment effect on dietary diversity, led by an increase in production diversity. Analysis of potential pathways show that effects on dietary diversity stem mostly from consumption of diverse food items purchased from the market made possible through higher agricultural income. These findings highlight that, while increasing production for markets can enhance dietary diversity through higher income that would make affordable an expanded set of food items, the production of more nutritious crops such as pulses may not necessarily translate into greater own consumption. This may be due to the persistence of dietary habits, tastes, or other local factors that favor consumption of staples such as maize and encourage sales of more profitable and nutritious food items such as pulses. Pulses are a more affordable and environmentally sustainable source of protein than animal source food, and efforts should be made to enhance their nutritional awareness and contribution to sustainable food systems and healthier diets.

Analyzing the Drivers of Household Dietary Diversity: Evidence from Burkina Faso.

BACKGROUND: The diets of millions of poor individuals lack adequate amount of essential nutrients. OBJECTIVE: To examine the determinants of household dietary diversity in Burkina Faso and assess whether the choice of a diversity metric matters. METHODS: Using survey data from 2014, we construct 3 metrics-Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), Berry Index (BI), and Healthy Food Diversity Index (HFDI). Unlike the oft-used HDDS, the BI captures the quantity distribution of food items while the HFDI captures all 3 aspects of a healthy diet-count, quantity distribution, and health value. We fit linear (for BI and HFDI) and Poisson (for HDDS) models controlling for several socioeconomic and climatic covariates. RESULTS: Some parameter estimates are sensitive to the diversity metric with fewer significant covariates observed in the HFDI model. Overall, diets are more diverse for households in urban areas, with female or better educated heads, with higher asset-based wealth and with more diverse on-farm production, while remoteness reduces dietary diversity. Higher precipitation seems to reduce diversity, potentially driven by the spatial heterogeneity in precipitation and on-farm production diversity. CONCLUSIONS: The sensitivity of estimates to the metric used underscores potentially more complex interactions that determine the quantity distribution of food items consumed. Policies that enhance on-farm production diversity, market access, and women's empowerment may help improve dietary diversity and subsequent nutritional benefits. Efforts should be made to compile health value data that are relevant to developing countries facing nutrition transition.

Welfare impacts of smallholder farmers' participation in multiple output markets: Empirical evidence from Tanzania.

A relatively large body of literature has documented the welfare effects of smallholder farmers' participation in single-commodity output markets. However, limited empirical evidence is available when smallholder farmers participate in multiple-commodities output markets. We tried to fill this gap in the literature by estimating the impacts of smallholder farmers' contemporaneous participation in both maize and legume markets vis-à-vis in only maize or legume markets using household-level data from Tanzania. Applying a multinomial endogenous switching regression model that allows controlling for observed and unobserved heterogeneity associated with market participation in single-commodity and multiple-commodity markets, results showed that smallholder farmers' participation in both single-and multiple-commodity markets was positively and significantly associated with household income and food security. Moreover, the greatest benefits were obtained when farmers participated in multiple-commodity markets, suggesting the importance of policies promoting diversification in crop income sources to increase welfare and food security. Our findings also signal the complementary-rather than substitute-nature of accessing multiple-commodity markets for enhancing household livelihoods under a specialization strategy. Finally, important policy implications are suggested, from promoting and supporting public infrastructure investments to expanding road networks to reduce transportation costs, especially in remote communities, to enhance smallholder farmer access to profitable maize and legume markets in Tanzania.

To diversify or not to diversify, that is the question. Pursuing agricultural development for smallholder farmers in marginal areas of Ghana.

Many smallholder farmers in developing countries grow multiple crop species on their farms, maintaining de facto crop diversity. Rarely do agricultural development strategies consider this crop diversity as an entry point for fostering agricultural innovation. This paper presents a case study, from an agricultural research-for-development project in northern Ghana, which examines the relationship between crop diversity and self-consumption of food crops, and cash income from crops sold by smallholder farmers in the target areas. By testing the presence and direction of these relationships, it is possible to assess whether smallholder farmers may benefit more from a diversification or a specialization agricultural development strategy for improving their livelihoods. Based on a household survey of 637 randomly selected households, we calculated crop diversity as well as its contribution to self-consumption (measured as imputed monetary value) and to cash income for each household. With these data we estimated a system of three simultaneous equations. Results show that households maintained high levels of crop diversity: up to eight crops grown, with an-average of 3.2 per household, and with less than 5% having a null or very low level of crop diversity. The value of crop species used for self-consumption was on average 55% higher than that of crop sales. Regression results show that crop diversity is positively associated with self-consumption of food crops, and cash income from crops sold. This finding suggests that increasing crop diversity opens market opportunities for households, while still contributing to self-consumption. Given these findings, crop diversification seems to be more beneficial to these farmers than specialization. For these diversified farmers, or others in similar contexts, interventions that assess and build on their de facto crop diversity are probably more likely to be successful.

Climate and poverty in Africa South of the Sahara.

To estimate the effects of weather conditions on welfare globally, cross-country comparisons need to rely on international poverty lines and comparable data sources at the micro-level. To this end, nationally representative household surveys can offer a useful instrument, also at the sub-national level. This study seeks to expand the existing knowledge on the determinants of poverty in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA), examining how long-term climatic conditions and year-specific weather shocks affect expenditure per capita. We take advantage of a novel and unique dataset combining consumption-based household surveys for 24 SSA countries -representative of more than half of the African population and two thirds of SSA- and geospatial information on agro-climatic conditions, market access and other spatial covariates of poverty. To our knowledge, it is the first time that a welfare-based, multidisciplinary, micro-level dataset with such wide spatial coverage has been assembled and examined. Our analysis relies on a linear and spatial model at the household- and district-level, respectively, both controlling for socio-economic, demographic, and geographic confounding factors. Results are consistent across econometric approaches, showing that living in more humid areas is positively associated with welfare, while the opposite occurs living in hotter areas, as existing literature shows. Flood shocks -defined as annual rainfall higher than one standard deviation from the 50-year average- are associated to a 35% decrease in total and food per-capita consumption and 17 percentage point increase in extreme poverty. On the other hand, extreme shortages of rain and heat shocks show an uncertain effect, even when estimates control for spatial correlation between welfare and weather conditions using the spatial error correction model. Given the heterogeneous effects of climatic events across SSA macro-regions, local-specific adaptation and mitigation strategies are suggested to help bringing households on a sustainable path.

Welfare effects of weather variability: Multi-country evidence from Africa south of the Sahara.

Climate change and weather variability pose serious threats to food and nutrition security as well as ecosystems, especially when livelihoods depend heavily on natural resources. This study examines the effect of weather variability (shock) occurring up to three planting and growing season prior on per capita monthly household expenditure in rural Tanzania, Uganda, and Ghana. The analyses combine monthly temperature (1950-2013) and precipitation (1981-2013) data with data from several rounds of household surveys conducted between 1998 and 2013. Substantial spatial and temporal heterogeneity is documented in the incidence of shocks, with effects dependent on both the study and lag period considered. Analysis of short panel data shows the cumulative effect of above-average precipitation on expenditure to be negative in Uganda -while positive in Tanzania-, but the relationship does not persist when pooling survey data spanning over a decade. The evidence from pooled data suggests a positive association between above-average temperature (heat wave) and expenditure in (historically cooler) Uganda, with the opposite effect observed in (the relatively warmer) Tanzania. For Ghana, the association between heat wave and expenditure is positive. There is no evidence of heterogeneous effects along several dimensions, except by agro-ecological condition. Further research into the effects of shocks on more direct outcomes-such as agricultural practices, yields, and dietary intake-is therefore recommended to shed light on possible impact pathways and appropriate localized adaptation strategies.

Trade-offs and synergies between yield, labor, profit, and risk in Malawian maize-based cropping systems.

Land degradation, population growth, and chronic poverty in Eastern and Southern Africa challenge the sustainability of livelihoods for smallholder farmers. These farmers often manage soils depleted of nutrients, apply limited amounts of mineral fertilizer, and take decisions about their cropping systems that involve multiple trade-offs. The rotation of cereals with legumes bears agronomic and ecological merit; however, the socio-economic implications of the cereal-legume rotation require a deeper understanding. This study explores the yield, labor, profit, and risk implications of different legume and mineral fertilizer practices in maize-based cropping systems in central Malawi. Our method involves coupling crop modeling and an agricultural household survey with a socio-economic analysis. We use a process-based cropping systems model to simulate the yield effects of integrating legumes into maize monocultures and applying mineral fertilizer over multiple seasons. We combine the simulated yields with socio-economic data from an agricultural household survey to calculate indicators of cropping-system performance. Our results show that a maize-groundnut rotation increases average economic profits by 75% compared with maize monoculture that uses more mineral fertilizer than in the rotation. The maize-groundnut rotation increases the stability of profits, reduces the likelihood of negative profits, and increases risk-adjusted profits. In contrast, the maize-groundnut rotation has a 54% lower average caloric yield and uses more labor than the maize monoculture with mineral fertilization. By comparing labor requirements with labor supply at the household scale, we show for the first time that the additional labor requirements of the maize-groundnut rotation can increase the likelihood of experiencing a labor shortage, if this rotation is undertaken by farm households in central Malawi. We demonstrate that risk and labor factors can be important when examining trade-offs among alternative cropping systems.

CELL5M: A geospatial database of agricultural indicators for Africa South of the Sahara.

Recent progress in large-scale georeferenced data collection is widening opportunities for combining multi-disciplinary datasets from biophysical to socioeconomic domains, advancing our analytical and modeling capacity. Granular spatial datasets provide critical information necessary for decision makers to identify target areas, assess baseline conditions, prioritize investment options, set goals and targets and monitor impacts. However, key challenges in reconciling data across themes, scales and borders restrict our capacity to produce global and regional maps and time series. This paper provides overview, structure and coverage of CELL5M-an open-access database of geospatial indicators at 5 arc-minute grid resolution-and introduces a range of analytical applications and case-uses. CELL5M covers a wide set of agriculture-relevant domains for all countries in Africa South of the Sahara and supports our understanding of multi-dimensional spatial variability inherent in farming landscapes throughout the region.

Gender and migration from Albania.

This article examines the dynamics and causes of the shift in the gender composition of migration, and more particularly, in women's access to migration opportunities and decision-making. Our analysis focuses on Albania, a natural laboratory for studying international migration where out-migration was essentially nonexistent from the end of World War II to the end of the 1980s. Interest in the Albanian case is heightened because of the complex layers of inequality existing at the time when migration began: relatively low levels of inequality within the labor market and educational system-a product of the Communist era-while household relations remained heavily steeped in tradition and patriarchy. We use micro-level data from the Albania 2005 Living Standards Measurement Study, including migration histories for family members since migration began. Based on discrete-time hazard models, the analysis shows a dramatic increase in male migration and a gradual and uneven expansion of the female proportion of this international migration. Female migration, which is shown to be strongly associated with education, wealth, and social capital, appears responsive to economic incentives and constraints. Using information on the dependency of female migration to the household demographic structure as well as the sensitivity of female migration to household-level shocks, we show how household-level constraints and incentives affect male and female migration differently. Throughout this period, however, women's migration behavior appears more directly aligned with household-level factors, and there is little evidence to suggest that increased female migration signals rising behavioral independence among Albanian women.