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Farm diversification and food and nutrition security in Bangladesh: empirical evidence from nationally representative household panel data

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Abstract

Existing literature suggests that farm production diversification has the potential to influence the diet diversity of farmers, but that the magnitude of the association is likely to vary by context and the underlying causal mechanisms are not well understood. This study analyzed the nexus between farm diversification and diet diversity using two round of nationally representative panel data from the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS), collected in 2011/12 and 2015. We used several indicators of dietary diversity including the Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), Women’s Dietary Diversity Score (WDDS), and the Food Variety Score (FVS). To measure farm diversification we used the total number of crop, vegetable and fruit species, the number of food crop species only, and the Margalef species richness index. We found robust evidence for a positive association between farm diversification and diet diversity, even when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across households using the conditional fixed effect Poisson model in order to take advantage of the panel structure of the data. The magnitude of the estimated effect was small. Analysis of other factors indicates that market access, commercialization of farms, diversification of income towards off farm sources and women’s empowerment also have positive and significant effects on household dietary diversity. These findings suggest that it may be necessary to couple efforts to increase farm diversity, market access, farm commercialization and income diversification with women’s empowerment in order to improve dietary diversity in Bangladesh. Further research is needed to better understand these complex relationships including their ultimate associations with nutritional status.

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Notes

  1. All the households who produce any food item even in their home/kitchen garden are included in the sample since home/kitchen gardens play an important role in consumption and nutrition in Bangladesh (Schreinemachers et al. 2015, 2016)

  2. FE models also ameliorate the potential violation of the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) (Muriithi and Matz 2015).

  3. To save space, results are not reported here but are available upon request.

  4. Including obesity because increase in diversified food consumption may lead to negative effects if it is concentrated in households that already consume a large amount of calories (Pellegrini and Tasciotti 2014).

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Acknowledgements

The IFPRI- BIHS two round panel survey data sets leading to these results has received funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Policy Research and Strategy Support Program (PRSSP). We acknowledge funding for this work received through the Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions (IMMANA) fellowship funded by UK Aid. We want to thank Tauseef Salauddin of IFPRI and Md. Sazzadur Rahman Sarker for their help with the BIHS panel data sets. We thank Prof. Dr. Will Masters, Dr. Andrew Jones, Dr. Suneetha Kadiyala and Prof. Patrick Webb as well as the conference participants at the ANH academy week in Nepal for useful comments. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the donor or the authors’ institution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, Boston, MA, USA

    Abu Hayat Md. Saiful Islam

  2. Department of Agricultural Economics, Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU), Mymensingh, 2202, Bangladesh

    Abu Hayat Md. Saiful Islam

  3. Center for Development Research (ZEF), Department of Economic and Technical Change, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Abu Hayat Md. Saiful Islam & Joachim von Braun

  4. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Andrew L. Thorne-Lyman

  5. Department of Nutrition, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Andrew L. Thorne-Lyman

  6. International Food Policy Research Institute, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Akhter U. Ahmed

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Annex A

Annex A

Table 6 Robustness of the results with other confounding factors
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Table 7 Robustness of the results in two way fixed effect estimation
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Table 8 Robustness of the results with alternative measure of household dietary diversity
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Table 9 Table 8 Robustness of the results with household food variety score: an alternative measure of household dietary diversity
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Table 10 Robustness of the results with alternative measure of farm diversification: Margalef species richness index
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Table 11 Robustness of the results with alternative measure of farm diversification: Food crop production diversity
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Islam, A.H.M.S., von Braun, J., Thorne-Lyman, A.L. et al. Farm diversification and food and nutrition security in Bangladesh: empirical evidence from nationally representative household panel data. Food Sec. 10, 701–720 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-018-0806-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-018-0806-3

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