Objective: Dietary diversity is associated with nutrient adequacy and positive
health outcomes but indicators to measure diversity have focused primarily on
consumption, rather than sustainable provisioning of food. The Nutritional
Functional Diversity score was developed by ecologists to describe the
contribution of biodiversity to sustainable diets. We have employed this tool to
estimate the relative contribution of home production and market purchases in
providing nutritional diversity to agricultural households in Malawi and examine
how food system provisioning varies by time, space and socio-economic
conditions.
Design: A secondary analysis of nationally representative household consumption
data to test the applicability of the Nutritional Functional Diversity score.
Setting: The data were collected between 2010 and 2011 across the country of
Malawi.
Subjects: Households (n 11 814) from predominantly rural areas of Malawi.
Results: Nutritional Functional Diversity varied demographically, geographically
and temporally. Nationally, purchased foods contributed more to household
nutritional diversity than home produced foods (mean score =17·5 and 7·8,
respectively). Households further from roads and population centres had lower
overall diversity (P <0·01) and accessed relatively more of their diversity from
home production than households closer to market centres (P<0·01). Nutritional
diversity was lowest during the growing season when farmers plant and tend
crops (P <0·01).
Conclusions: The present analysis demonstrates that the Nutritional Functional
Diversity score is an effective indicator for identifying populations with low
nutritional diversity and the relative roles that markets, agricultural extension and
home production play in achieving nutritional diversity. This information may be
used by policy makers to plan agricultural and market-based interventions that
support sustainable diets and local food systems.