Does Livestock Ownership Affect Animal Source Foods Consumption and Child Nutritional Status? Evidence from Rural Uganda

Abstract

In many developing countries consumption of animal source foods (ASF) among the poor is still at a level where increasing its share in total caloric intake may have many positive nutritional benefits. This paper explores whether ownership of different livestock species increases consumption of ASF and helps improving child nutritional status, finding some evidence that both food consumption patterns and nutritional outcomes may be affected by livestock ownership in rural Uganda. Our results are suggestive that promoting (small) livestock ownership has the potential for affecting human nutrition in rural Uganda, but further research is needed to more precisely estimate the direction and size of these effects.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

Senior authorship is shared by Azzarri and Zezza. We would like to thank Paul Winters, Gero Carletto, Luc Christiaensen and the participants of the World Bank workshop on ‘Farm-level pathways to improved nutritional status’ for their helpful suggestions. The comments of two anonymous referees helped us greatly improve an earlier draft. Any errors and omissions are entirely ours, as are the views expressed in the paper that should not be attributed to the organisations we are affiliated with.

Notes

1. Examples are papers in a 2003 Supplement of the Journal of Nutrition, and Villa et al. (2011).

2. Child anthropometrics data are only for 2009/10 since the 2005/06 survey did not collect this information.

3. The percentage of households with no expenditure is 71–73 per cent for beef (depending on the year), 91–93 per cent for chicken, 90–94 per cent for goat and sheep meat, 65–68 per cent for dairy, and 45–49 per cent for animal source food.

4. AEZs are geographical areas sharing similar climate characteristics (for example, rainfall and temperature) with respect to their potential to support (usually rainfed) agricultural production. They are often used to identify land suitable for rainfed cultivation and for the production of specific crops.

5. It is a variable assessing the degree of live green vegetation in the observed area. Negative values of NDVI (approaching −1) correspond to water. Values close to zero (−0.1 to 0.1) generally correspond to barren areas of rock, sand, or snow. Lastly, low, positive values represent shrub and grassland (approximately 0.2 to 0.4), while high values indicate temperate and tropical rainforests (values approaching 1). Here the NDVI is expressed as ten year average over the period 2000–2010 (NASA, 2011).

6. We have also estimated linear models (ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares) for comparison, and provide these in an online appendix (Tables A14–A16)

7. Per-capita expenditure is considered endogenous with respect to child malnutrition since the latter could be also considered a determinant of lower welfare status. The argument runs as follows: malnourished children need more care from their parents, who in devoting a greater share of their time to childcare may earn less and hence dispose of lower monetary resources for expenditure.

8. Our regressions control for market access including a variable for travel time to the nearest town with at least 20,000 people. In the random effects model, it has differential impact according to the livestock type, being negative for beef consumption (given the relative scarcity of this food item in rural areas), while positive for chicken consumption, reflecting the relative abundance of chickens in rural setting. The variable is time invariant and is therefore not included in the fixed effect estimates.