Cows, Missing Milk Markets, and Nutrition in Rural Ethiopia

Abstract

In rural economies encumbered by significant market imperfections, farming decisions may partly be motivated by nutritional considerations, in addition to income and risk factors. These imperfections create the potential for farm assets to have direct dietary impacts on nutrition in addition to any indirect effects via income. We test this hypothesis for the dairy sector in rural Ethiopia, finding that cow ownership raises children’s milk consumption, increases linear growth, and reduces stunting. We also find that household cow ownership is less important where there is good access to local markets, suggesting that market development can substitute for household cow ownership.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Jef Leroy for discussions regarding the nutritional aspects of milk and other colleagues in Ethiopia with whom we are collaborating on the evaluation of Ethiopia’s Agricultural Growth Programme. We acknowledge the helpful comments received from John Maluccio, seminar participants at Cornell and ILRI-Addis Ababa and participants at the 2014 CSAE Conference on African Development and at the ‘Farm production and nutrition’ workshop held at the World Bank in June 2013.

Notes

1. The biological mechanisms underlying this are not fully understood. Cow’s milk contains insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I), which plays a key role in growth in early life. However, it is not clear if it is the presence of IGF-I in milk, or whether compounds in milk stimulate human production of IGF-I (Hoppe, Mølgaard, Juul, & Michaelsen, 2004; Hoppe, Mølgaard, & Michaelsen, 2006).

2. The care of dairy cows is often the task of female farmers, which may enable mothers to better regulate production and child consumption.

3. An early study of dairy producers around Addis Ababa in the mid-1980s found large discrepancies in the prices received by milk producing households, which they attributed to information asymmetries and transport costs (Staal, Delgado, & Nicholson, 1997).

4. Sadler and Catley (2009) provide a qualitative discussion in the context of pastoral areas in Ethiopia.

5. For a recent discussion, see Lafave and Thomas (2012).

6. Specifically, we assume a one period model with no lump sum transfers, no inputs into production apart from labour and capital that wages and labour supply are not functions of nutrient intake and that there is no intra-household bargaining. Given the focus of our paper, relaxing these assumptions will not affect our approach.

7. On this, see Fafchamps, Udry, and Czukas (1998) and Hoddinott (2006).

8. Increased smallholder productivity and value-added in the agricultural sector are core elements of the Ethiopian Government’s approach to poverty reduction. The AGP began in the second half of 2011. It is planned as a five-year programme that increases agricultural productivity and market access for key crop and livestock products.

9. A woreda is the administrative unit below a region and is loosely akin to a district or county.

10. The EA-level sample is divided into female- and male-headed households and each group further divided into youth-headed and mature-headed households. Thus the EA sample is divided into a total of four age-gender groups. Consequently, the AGP baseline slightly oversamples households headed by both young and mature females relative to their population share.

11. There is no impact on wasting for children 6–24 months; for brevity, these results are omitted but are available on request.

12. Given the highly perishable nature of milk, we believe that most villages would require a market in the village itself in order to purchase milk on a regular basis. That said, we note that this is a fairly crude measure of market access; see Baltenweck and Staal (2007).

13. Note that these are in addition to land, which is controlled for in the basic specification.

14. We also estimated regressions for the full sample of children aged 6–59 months. In contrast to our AGP results, we found that cow ownership had significant benefits for child growth across the full range of children under five years of age. Results are available upon request.

15. The process of commercialisation of an agricultural sector can, however, have some ambiguous effects on food consumption and nutrition, especially in producing households. For an interesting example of dairy cooperatives in India, see Alderman (1994).

Additional information

Funding

This work has partly been supported by the Department for International Development (UK) through its funding of the Transform Nutrition Consortium and by the consortium of donors supporting IFPRI’s Ethiopia Strategy Support Program (ESSP).