Production and Dietary Diversities with Seasonality in Rural Agricultural Context in Sri Lanka: A Case of Mahakanumulla Village Tank Cascade System

Abstract

Dietary diversity is considered a characteristic of a healthy diet. Improving production diversity is a way to increase dietary diversity in subsistence farming contexts. However, with the agricultural transformation, this association must be revisited. The study aimed to investigate the association between production diversity and dietary diversity in rural agricultural households in Sri Lanka taking seasonality into account. The study site was the Mahakanumulla Village Tank Cascade System in the dry zone of Sri Lanka. Pooled Ordinary Least Squares regression was used in the estimation. The results indicated that production diversity and dietary diversity have a positive and statistically significant relationship. The education level of the household head, income and household size were also identified as factors affecting household dietary diversity. The households seem to smoothen dietary diversity levels across months; hence, there is no significant difference in dietary diversity between Yala/Maha seasons or pre- and post-harvesting periods. Cultivating some specific crop types such as cereals, involvement of livestock farming, and the season affected the frequency of consumption of some food groups such as dairy and meat. This study concludes that increasing production diversity could improve the nutrition of rural agricultural households in Sri Lanka. Hence, nutrition development programmes may benefit from encouraging production diversity in rural agricultural contexts.