Agricultural Production Diversity and Child Nutritional Outcomes in Rural Myanmar

Abstract

This paper empirically investigates the links between agricultural diversity and child nutritional status in rural Myanmar. The data for this analysis come from a two-round survey of households conducted in six rural townships in Myanmar between February 2016 and November 2017. Using the child anthropometric measures haz, whz, waz, stunting, and underweight, our results show that child nutritional status worsened between 2016 and 2017. Our empirical results show that greater agricultural production diversity was associated with poorer anthropometric outcomes among young children aged between 6 and 35 months. Home garden ownership is statistically significant and positively associated with younger children’s anthropometric outcomes, whilst migration is negatively associated with wasting and underweight probability of older children. Livelihood diversification through migration is an important channel to address child undernutrition in our study areas in rural Myanmar, particularly in the long term when children grow older.

Keywords:

• food security
• child nutrition
• agriculture
• home garden
• migration
• Myanmar

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In 2017, GDP per capita of Myanmar was US$ 1256.66, the eighth lowest in Asia. Available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.pcap.cd [30 January 2021].

2. The survey is a part of the Australian Research Council’s Project ‘Explaining Food and Nutrition Insecurity under Conditions of Rapid Economics and Social Change: A Nutrition-Sensitive Analysis of Livelihood Decision-making in rural Myanmar’. (Pritchard et al., 2018).

3. We use the term ‘land ownership’ to indicate land controlled directly by households, although land is officially owned by the State in Myanmar.

4. Household’s ethnicity is excluded due to its high correlation with geographical regions. Specifically, Bamar and Chin ethnicity accounted for about 97 per cent of our sample, and Bamar people resided in townships of Magway and Ayeyarwady States, and Chin people resided in the two Chin townships.

5. Our dataset does not contain information on infectious diseases, so we are unable to control for diarrhoea and malaria, which may potentially impact on child nutrition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP150102053].