Abstract
Seasonal variations in agriculture is a major contributor to undernutrition in many agrarian economies. While recent studies have highlighted the role of markets in improving nutrition, the relative importance of markets in smoothing food consumption across seasons remains largely unexamined. Using data from Sierra Leone, this paper analyses whether access to local food markets mitigates seasonal fluctuations in household dietary diversity and food security. Our results confirm that agricultural seasonality imposes significant fluctuations on household dietary diversity and food security. Households, especially those in rural areas, are found to experience significant deteriorations in dietary diversity and food security during the lean season. Most importantly, the results also show that households with better market access consume more diverse diets and are more food secure in both lean and non-lean seasons than remoter households. An important policy implication of these results is that market-based interventions aimed at strengthening market access through improved market infrastructure and roads can significantly contribute to year-long food consumption smoothing, improved dietary diversity and overall food and nutrition security.
Highlights
Achieving food security requires that people have access at all times to adequate nutritious foods to meet their dietary needs for a healthy and active life
This study examines the role of seasonality in shaping household dietary diversity and food security over the agricultural production cycle in Sierra Leone
We find that household diets and food security primarily follow the regular patterns of agricultural production: improving during the harvesting season and worsening in the post-harvest period
Summary
Achieving food security requires that people have access at all times to adequate nutritious foods to meet their dietary needs for a healthy and active life. The associated high transaction costs can inhibit market integration, resulting in incomplete price transmission and reduction of information available to economic actors, which in turn lead to decisions that contribute to inefficient outcomes (Abdulai, 2000; de Janvry et al, 1991; Moser et al, 2009) These include higher output and input prices, reduced movements of farm products and other goods, erosion of gains from trade; lower agricultural production due to limited access to and adoption of modern productivity-enhancing inputs and technologies, adoption of low-yielding food crops instead of high-value cash crops, huge postharvest losses at the farmgate, and lower accessibility, availability and diversity of foods on local markets, in remote locations. Access to (product) markets may improve access to credit (in the form of cash, inputs, or food), thereby enabling households to smooth consumption across seasons (Schrieder & Heidhues, 1995; Zeller et al, 1997)
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