Deconstructing Diets: The Role of Wealth, Farming System, and Landscape Context in Shaping Rural Diets in Ethiopia

Laura Vang Rasmussen,Sylvia L. R. Wood,Jeanine M. Rhemtulla

doi:10.3389/fsufs.2020.00045

Laura Vang Rasmussen, Sylvia L. R. Wood + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.00045

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Abstract

Dietary diversification is central to improving dietary quality and nutrition for food security. Several factors have been linked to higher diversity diets, including household wealth, market access, on-farm crop diversity and regional forest cover. How these factors combine in landscapes to shape diets, however, is not well understood. We take the Ethiopian context as a case study of how wealth, farming system type, and landscape context interact to explain household dietary profiles. Using cluster analysis on nationally representative data on household food consumption, we identify three distinct dietary profiles across rural Ethiopia: 1) A low diversity diet, 2) A diverse diet particularly rich in fruit and vegetables, and 3) A diverse diet also rich in oils, fats and sugars. We found that the low diversity diet was strongly associated with households in the bottom and middle wealth classes that were mostly involved in cereal-based farming, although not exclusively. In contrast, the diverse diet high in fruit and vegetables was primarily composed of households with coffee-agroforestry farming systems, and did not appear to be limited to any particular wealth class, although it was positively associated with forest cover. Households with a diverse diet profile also rich in oils, fats and sugars were stratified across multiple different farming types, situated closer to roads, and primarily came from the middle and top wealth classes. Finally, while forest cover was strongly associated with a dietary profile rich in fruits and vegetable and the pursuit of coffee-agroforestry farming, the forest cover in cereal-based systems was still significantly positively associated with the consumption of dark green leafy vegetables and fruits. This suggests that even small amounts of forest cover can contribute to healthy diets. These results, which illuminate how wealth, farming system type, and landscape context shape dietary profiles, have important implications for the design of effective food security policies in Ethiopia.

Highlights

More than two billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies caused by poor diets (Haddad et al, 2015), which can impair childhood development and adult productivity (Lim et al, 2012; Black et al, 2013)
A low diversity diet was strongly associated with households in the bottom and middle wealth classes, while households with a diverse diet profile rich in oils, fats and sugars primarily came from the middle and top wealth classes
We found that a low diversity diet was strongly associated with households in the bottom and middle wealth classes that were primarily involved in cereal-based farming, not exclusively

Summary

Introduction

More than two billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies caused by poor diets (Haddad et al, 2015), which can impair childhood development and adult productivity (Lim et al, 2012; Black et al, 2013). Most large-scale food security policies and funding efforts have placed heavy emphasis on meeting basic dietary energy intake by increasing the production and availability of staple crops (World Health Organization, 2005; Forouzanfar et al, 2016), with less attention to the nutritional constituents of diets (Ickowitz et al, 2019) While such efforts have reduced the proportion of hungry people globally (FAO, 2018), the current global agricultural system does not provide the foods necessary for nutritionally adequate diets (Ickowitz et al, 2019; Willett et al, 2019). Agricultural expansion and conventional intensification are often associated with deforestation (Angelsen and Kaimowitz, 2001; Ordway et al, 2017; Curtis et al, 2018), which can reduce dietary diversity by decreasing the availability of wild foods (Rowland et al, 2016; Galway et al, 2018) and other forest products that can be sold to enable the purchase of diverse foods (Hickey et al, 2016)

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