Produce to eat or sell: Panel data structural equation modeling of market participation and food dietary diversity in Zambia

Abstract

Abstract With only 10\xa0years before the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger, the global community is in a race to address mounting food and nutrition insecurity among the over 820 million people in the World. This is more profound for developing countries like Zambia where food and nutrition insecurity remain huge development challenges. Output market participation by smallholder rural households has been touted as a possible pathway to improving dietary diversity in addition to production diversity. This study applied structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques to a nationally representative, two-wave household-level panel data of over 6000 rural smallholder farmers in Zambia to assess the extent to which participation in output markets affects dietary diversity and how this effect changed between 2015 and 2019. We measure dietary diversity using a household dietary diversity score (HDDS) and market participation using household commercialization index. We find that market participation enhances household dietary diversity, with the effect being stronger in 2019 than in 2015. Besides reinforcing the importance of market access and participation in improving household nutritional outcomes, our finding demonstrate the increasing role of markets in the nutrition of rural households. Another key result is that household production diversity improves dietary diversity. Taken together, these findings imply that nutrition sensitive agricultural interventions should concomitantly help improve market access and participation for smallholder farmers, and promote a broader food group diversification at the farm level.