Deforestation reduces fruit and vegetable consumption in rural Tanzania

Citation

Hall CM, Rasmussen LV, Powell B, Dyngeland C, Jung S & Olesen RS (2022) Deforestation reduces fruit and vegetable consumption in rural Tanzania. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119 (10), Art. No.: e2112063119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2112063119

Abstract
Strategies to improve food and nutrition security continue to promote increasing food via agricultural intensification. Little (if any) consideration is given to the role of natural landscapes such as forests in meeting nutrition goals, despite a growing body of literature that shows that having access to these landscapes can improve people’s diets, particularly in rural areas of low- and middle-income countries. In this study, we tested whether deforestation over a 5-y period (2008–2013) affected people’s dietary quality in rural Tanzania using a modeling approach that combined two-way fixed-effects regression analysis with covariate balancing generalized propensity score (CBGPS) weighting which allowed for causal inferences to be made. We found that, over the 5 y, deforestation caused a reduction in household fruit and vegetable consumption and thus vitamin A adequacy of diets. The average household member experienced a reduction in fruit and vegetable consumption of 14 g⋅d−1, which represented a substantial proportion (11%) of average daily intake. Conversely, we found that forest fragmentation over the survey period led to an increase in consumption of these foods and dietary vitamin A adequacy. This study finds a causal link between deforestation and people’s dietary quality, and the results have important implications for policy makers given that forests are largely overlooked in strategies to improve nutrition, but offer potential “win–wins” in terms of meeting nutrition goals as well as conservation and environmental goals.

Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Volume 119, Issue 10

People

Dr Charlotte Hall

Lecturer in Environmental Geography, Biological and Environmental Sciences