Farm production diversity and its association with dietary diversity in Kenya
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Farm production diversity and its association with dietary diversity in Kenya Davis Muthini 1 & Jonathan Nzuma 1 & Rose Nyikal 1 Received: 1 March 2019 / Accepted: 5 April 2020 # International Society for Plant Pathology and Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Agriculture has the potential to improve dietary diversity through farm production diversity if farming households consume what they produce. However, the linkages between a household’s own agricultural production and dietary diversity are not well understood. This study uses a count of crop species, animal species, production diversity score, and the Simpson’s index as measures of farm production diversity to assess the effect of production diversity on the dietary diversity of households, women and children. A Poison model was employed on a sample of 779 farming households selected using a multistage sampling technique in a household survey representative at the County level in Kisii and Nyamira Counties, Kenya. The findings of the study indicate that farm production diversity is significantly associated with the dietary diversity of women and that of the entire household, but is not associated with the dietary diversity of children. The count of the animal species has the highest magnitude of association with dietery diversity in this study. Every additional animal species kept leads to a 0.33 and 0.13 increase in household dietery diversity and the dietery diversity of women respectively. Children’s dietary diversity is significantly associated with the education of the mother, household size and age of the child. The study highlights the need to consider individual dietary requirements when developing nutrition interventions and policy, as opposed to general dietary interventions targeting the entire household. Keywords Farm diversity . Diet diversity . Nutrition outcomes . Food groups
1 Introduction Close to one billion people in the world are undernourished (FAO 2018). According to FAO (2018), a majority of the people who are undernourished live in the rural areas of low-income countries in Africa and Asia. In Kenya, approximately 24.2% of the population is undernourished (FAO 2018). Undernutrition causes severe economic losses at the individual, household and national levels (Gödecke et al. 2018; World Health Organization [WHO] 2006). The annual cost of micronutrient deficiencies in low-income countries has been estimated at between 2.4 and 10% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (Freijer et al. 2018, 2013; Stein and Qaim 2007; Horton and Ross 2003). Women and children are more
* Davis Muthini [email protected] 1
Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Nairobi, P.O Box 29053, Nairobi 00625, Kenya
vulnerable to the effects of undernutrition because of their high nutritional requirements for growth and development, different physiological requirements, and contribution to the intergenerational cycle of undernutrition and ill health (Merchant and Kurz 2018; Kim et al. 2017; Blossner et al. 2005). Besides enhanced access
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