A model-based exploration of farm-household livelihood and nutrition indicators to guide nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions

Natalia Estrada-Carmona,Stephanie Alvarez,Lenora Ditzler,Roseline Remans,Inge Brouwer,Karin Borgonjen-Van Den Berg,Elise F Talsma,Jessica E Raneri,Jeroen C J Groot,Gina Kennedy,Shantonu Abe Chatterjee,Carl Timler

doi:10.1007/s12571-019-00985-0

Natalia Estrada-Carmona, Stephanie Alvarez + Show 10 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-019-00985-0

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Abstract

Assessing progress towards healthier people, farms and landscapes through nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) requires transdisciplinary methods with robust models and metrics. Farm-household models could facilitate disentangling the complex agriculture-nutrition nexus, by jointly assessing performance indicators on different farm system components such as farm productivity, farm environmental performance, household nutrition, and livelihoods. We, therefore, applied a farm-household model, FarmDESIGN, expanded to more comprehensively capture household nutrition and production diversity, diet diversity, and nutrient adequacy metrics. We estimated the potential contribution of an NSA intervention targeting the diversification of home gardens, aimed at reducing nutritional gaps and improving livelihoods in rural Vietnam. We addressed three central questions: (1) Do ‘Selected Crops’ (i.e. crops identified in a participatory process) in the intervention contribute to satisfying household dietary requirements?; (2) Does the adoption of Selected Crops contribute to improving household livelihoods (i.e. does it increase leisure time for non-earning activities as well as the dispensable budget)?; and (3) Do the proposed nutrition-related metrics estimate the contribution of home-garden diversification towards satisfying household dietary requirements? Results indicate trade-offs between nutrition and dispensable budget, with limited farm-household configurations leading to jointly improved nutrition and livelihoods. FarmDESIGN facilitated testing the robustness and limitations of commonly used metrics to monitor progress towards NSA. Results indicate that most of the production diversity metrics performed poorly at predicting desirable nutritional outcomes in this modelling study. This study demonstrates that farm-household models can facilitate anticipating the effect (positive or negative) of agricultural interventions on nutrition and the environment, identifying complementary interventions for significant and positive results and helping to foresee the trade-offs that farm-households could face. Furthermore, FarmDESIGN could contribute to identifying agreed-upon and robust metrics for measuring nutritional outcomes at the farm-household level, to allow comparability between contexts and NSA interventions.

Highlights

Worldwide commitment and interest in supporting nutritionsensitive agriculture (NSA) is growing across multiple sectors (Ruel et al 2018)
We addressed three central questions: (1) Do ‘Selected Crops’ in the intervention contribute to satisfying household dietary requirements?; (2) Does the adoption of Selected Crops contribute to improving household livelihoods?; and (3) Do the proposed nutrition-related metrics estimate the contribution of home-garden diversification towards satisfying household dietary requirements?
The global commitment to end malnutrition through nutritionsensitive agriculture (NSA) requires the use of robust methods, models, and metrics that disentangle the complex relationship between agriculture- and nutrition (Herforth and Ballard 2016)

Summary

Introduction

Worldwide commitment and interest in supporting nutritionsensitive agriculture (NSA) is growing across multiple sectors (Ruel et al 2018). Increasing on-farm production diversity is perceived as an effective approach towards improving smallholders’ diet diversity and nutrition. Ruel et al (2018), on the other hand, found evidence from 44 carefully designed nutrition-sensitive studies where production diversity was promoted and subsequently led to improved access to nutritious food, which increased the quality of the diet for the most vulnerable (i.e. women and children) (Ruel et al 2018). The mixed evidence is due to methodological limitations (e.g. sample sizes, time frame), contextual and seasonal constraints, lack of comparability of the agricultural interventions, nonhomogeneity of units of observation (e.g. households, women and children) and variability of metrics (Ruel et al 2018; Verger et al 2019; Herforth and Ballard 2016; Turner et al 2014; Webb and Kennedy 2014)

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