Effect of market production on rural household food consumption: evidence from Uganda

Abstract

Food access is an important element of food security that has since long been a major concern of rural households. One intervention to improve food access has been increased promotion of market production in the hope that households will get increased income and access to food through the market rather than through self-sufficiency characteristic of subsistence production. We examine the effect of market production on household food consumption using a case of rice in western Uganda, where rice is largely a cash crop. Our analysis is based on propensity score matching and instrumental variable approach using survey data collected from 1137 rural households. We find evidence of negative significant effects of market production on calorie consumption; More commercialized households are more likely to consume less than the required calories per adult equivalent per day. This implies that the substitution effects due to higher shadow prices of food outweigh the income effects of additional crop sales. On the contrary, we find positive significant effects on household dietary diversity. We suggest a mixed approach combining policies targeted at market production as well as production for own consumption, and nutrition sensitization.

Limitations of Inclusive Agribusiness in Contributing to Food and Nutrition Security in a Smallholder Community. A Case of Mango Initiative in Makueni County, Kenya

“…As illustrated above, both groups of smallholders consume the same types of food groups-severely lacking in some critical nutrients. The lack of contribution by the business to household nutrition diversity is in contrast to some studies that have found that an improvement in farm income has a positive effect on a household's dietary diversity [63,65,126,127]. Nevertheless, the findings are consistent with the fact that the business participants, who happen to have relatively higher incomes, spend similar amounts on food as non-participants.…”

Evaluation of Nutrition and Income Generation Intervention (NIGI) Uganda : evaluation on the effect of NIGI on the refugee community in the Omugo refugee settlement in Northern Uganda

“…Increased market production can result in higher HDDS but also in less calorie intake (Ntakyo & van den Berg, 2019). Furthermore, Sekabira and Nalunga (2020) showed that increased HH production for own consumption increased HDDS more than increased production for trade.…”

Making Cash Crop Value Chains Nutrition-Sensitive: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Rural Sierra Leone

“…In the same vein, commercialized production of food crops as cash crops, such as rice in Uganda (Ntakyo & van den Berg, 2019), sugarcane in Mexico (Dewey, 1981), and vegetables in Guatemala (Immink & Alarcon, 1993), has been found to be undesirably associated with dietary deterioration and lower food caloric intake.…”

“…SeeDeWalt (1993), von Braun andKennedy (1995) and WorldBank (2007) for survey of early literature. Recently, while some recent studies reported positive effects of cash cropping and commercialization on food security and nutritional outcomes(Kuma, Dereje, Hirvonen, & Minten, 2018;Kuma et al, 2015;Ogutu, Gödecke, & Qaim, 2019),Anderman et al (2014) andNtakyo and van den Berg (2019) found that cash cropping hurts food security among cocoa producers in Ghana and calorie intake among commercialized rice producers in Uganda respectively.…”