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Urban Agriculture and Dietary Diversity: Empirical Evidence from Tanzania

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Abstract

The recent increases in food prices have been dramatic. In Tanzania, average prices for key food items climbed at least 50 per cent between 2007 and 2009; rising prices had a significant effect on Tanzania’s growing group of urban poor as their food budget share amounts to 67 per cent. This article studies the effects of practicing agriculture in urban Tanzania on indicators of dietary diversity, quantifying the share of urban dwellers engaged in urban agriculture and assessing the importance of urban agriculture in ensuring food diversity. Results suggest that households engaged in urban agriculture have a more diversified diet: they increase the variety of (i) meat, fish and eggs by 10 per cent, (ii) dairy products by at least 16 per cent and (iii) fruits and vegetables by up to 9 per cent. The urban poor is the group that profits most from the dietary diversification relative to richer households.

Abstract

Les hausses récentes des prix des aliments ont étés dramatiques. En Tanzanie, les prix moyens des aliments de base ont monté au moins du 50% entre 2007 et 2009. La hausse des prix a eu un effet significatif sur le nombre montant des pauvres urbains, puisque leur dépense sur les aliments est 67% de leur budget. Ici on étude l’effet que l’agriculture dans les zones urbaines de Tanzanie a sur les indicateurs de diversité diététique; on quantifie la proportion d’habitants urbaines qui pratiquent de l’agriculture urbaine, et on évalue l’importance de l’agriculture urbaine dans la provision d’une alimentation variée. Les résultats indiquent que les ménages qui pratiquent de l’agriculture urbaine ont une diète plus variée: ils augmentent la variété de (1) la viande, les poissons, et les œufs consumées de 10%, (2) des produits laitiers de 16%, et (3) des fruits et légumes de 9%. Les pauvres urbains sont le groupe qui profite le plus de la diversification de leur diète, compares a d’autres ménages plus aisés.

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Notes

  1. For more details, please see the Website www.fao.org/docrep/x0262e/x0262e22.htm, last accessed 20 August 2013.

  2. The UN ACC/SCN stated that ‘[…] a household is food secure when it has access to the food needed for a healthy life for all its members (adequate in terms of quality, quantity, safety, and cultural acceptability), and when it is not at undue risk of losing such access’ (UN ACC/SCN, 1991) (for more information, please visit the Website www.unscn.org/layout/modules/resources/files/Policy_paper_No_10.pdf, last accessed 16 May 2014).

  3. Even though the aim of this paper is to study urban agriculture in a developing country, it is important to point out that urban agriculture is also practiced in several developed countries. Urban dwellers in Asian cities produce their own food; this is also the case in England, Germany, Holland, Japan, Poland, Italy and the United States (Bills, 1991; Latz, 1991).

  4. Restricting policies during the 1960s and 1970s allowed local police to destroy crops cultivated within the local perimeter of cities. A popular urban legend suggests that local authorities were concerned that a tall crop, especially maize, would be a perfect hiding place for criminals; on a more serious note, mosquitoes are most likely to breed where plants grow. A more relaxed attitude regarding urban agriculture started to be adopted in the 1980s and nowadays urban farming is allowed (Foeken and Mwangi, 2000).

  5. The property right of the plot has not been taken into account as most urban agriculture is practiced on governmental, institutional or other individual allotments (Halweil, 2002).

  6. Imposing a stricter condition on the number of livestock kept – more than 10 chickens or more than 3 small ruminants – does not have any effect on the empirical results.

  7. Even though Figure 1 is here shown for the household level, it has to be stressed that the very same framework can be applied at the national, regional and global level. This link is detailed in Hoddinott (2012).

  8. For more details on the link between dietary diversity and nutrition, please refer to Frison et al (2006).

  9. For a more comprehensive literature review on the relation between urban agriculture projects and the nutritional status of children, please refer to Masset et al (2012).

  10. For a comprehensive description and history of the dietary diversity measures, please refer to Ruel (2003).

  11. The USAID project aggregates food into 12 different food groups: cereals; fish and seafood; root vegetables and tubers; pulses/legumes/nuts; vegetables; milk and milk products; fruits; oils/fats; meat, poultry; sugar/honey; eggs; and miscellaneous (USAID, 2006). In this study we further aggregate the previous food groups, creating five categories of food.

  12. The use of a multipurpose survey in the context of this study presents advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, data on the household consumption of food presents limitations as it is aggregate information that does not account for food consumed outside the household (for more details please refer to Fiedler et al, 2012); on the other hand, it allows us to use a detailed set of household control variables that would not otherwise be available.

  13. We measure expenditure in Tanzanian shillings and convert all expenditure categories reported into monthly per capita household expenditures; based on this information the quintiles were constructed.

  14. The expenditure quintiles are widely used as a proxy for the standard of living of the households. This model aims to capture which strata of the urban population gets the highest benefits in terms of dietary diversity from crop and livestock activities.

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Acknowledgements

We received valuable comments from John Hoddinott during the 2014 CSAE meeting, three anonymous referees and the Editor-in-Chief Dr Henson. All remaining errors of omission or commission are our own.

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  1. Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Luca Tasciotti & Natascha Wagner

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  1. Luca Tasciotti
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Appendix A

Appendix A

Table A1

Table A1 Descriptive statistics
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Tasciotti, L., Wagner, N. Urban Agriculture and Dietary Diversity: Empirical Evidence from Tanzania. Eur J Dev Res 27, 631–649 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2014.38

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