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(MENAFN – The Conversation) In Ethiopia, the average person eats only 42 kg of fruits and vegetables per year. This is well below the WHO recommendation of 146 kg per year. Fruits and vegetables are excellent sources of vitamins and minerals, vital for our body.
Deficiencies can seriously affect our physical health, increasing the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer, which in turn increases the risk of premature death. In Ethiopia, low-quality diets are now seen as one of the main underlying causes of the increase in non-communicable diseases in the country.
The problem is that fruits and vegetables are often too expensive and inaccessible for most. In Ethiopia, the average household would have to spend more than 10% of its income to meet the international recommendation of two servings of fruit and three servings of vegetables per person per day.
To increase the availability of fruits and vegetables, the Ethiopian government is promoting large-scale family gardens across the country. Since 2016, Ethiopia’s goals for home gardens are: 40% of rural households by 2020 and 25% of urban households by 2020.
Family gardens are an area around the home that is used to grow fruits and vegetables for the family. Unlike traditional smallholder agriculture, the cultivated area is small and the plot is close to the house, allowing year-round cultivation as it can be irrigated using the house’s water source.
It is not a new idea. Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), like Helen Keller International, have launched home gardening programs. These were designed to teach families how to grow fruits and vegetables for their own consumption and improve their nutritional knowledge. In Africa, these programs have been implemented in more than 20 countries in the past decade.
But there are valid reasons to doubt whether these programs provide a sustainable and cost-effective way to tackle poor nutrition.
In a recent study in Ethiopia, we set out to analyze how effective family garden programs are, and if this means that more countries should try to implement it. This is the first research study examining a large-scale government project and we hope it will report whether or not these projects are feasible.
Home garden concerns
There are three long-standing concerns among professionals and researchers with home gardens.
First, virtually all food production programs for home gardens have been implemented by NGOs, often equipped with highly trained and motivated staff. But a sustainable expansion eventually requires turning management over to public health officials or other government workers who are often burdened with other tasks and may not have the same capacity.
Second, fruits and vegetables generally require a lot of water to grow. Until now, existing home garden programs have operated primarily in settings where access to water is not a major constraint.
Finally, some economists question whether it is necessary to wait for all households to produce their own food. This is particularly the case in areas where food markets function reasonably well.
We wanted to see if and how these concerns were developing in Ethiopia.
Ethiopian home gardens
Ethiopian households have practiced home gardening for centuries, but insufficient consumption of healthy fruits and vegetables in rural areas seems to justify expanding and improving this practice. This is because most small-scale ‘backyard’ production has traditionally focused on crops that are high in calories but poor in nutrition, such as corn and stimulant, such as coffee or khat.
We use rich data from surveys of more than 2,500 households in various districts with chronic food insecurity in Ethiopia. This is where small-scale cereal-based agriculture is the main source of livelihood.
We found that only about 15% of households operated a vegetable garden where they grew fruits or vegetables. Limited access to water was the main limitation, and a small number of households reported lack of time, skills, and supplies as reasons why they had not adopted a family garden.
Interestingly, we also found that homes located closest to a good market were more likely to adopt home gardening. This suggests that fruit and vegetable production offers valuable access to cash income. While there is potentially income and nutrition compensation at the household level, it could be argued that more fruits and vegetables in local food markets is good for the wider community.
This also raises the question of whether these programs should focus on improving the availability of fruits and vegetables in local markets, rather than at the household level. This would mean that other rural households would have a supply and the producing household can use the extra income to buy other nutritious food or invest it in other ways.
Transcendence
We believe that these findings have important implications for family garden programs in Ethiopia, and perhaps elsewhere in Africa as well.
In the context that NGOs are the main driver of these programs outside of Ethiopia, it is encouraging to see indicative evidence that public extensionists can successfully change agricultural practices for better nutritional outcomes on a considerable scale. It means they are trustworthy and are important agents of change.
But our findings require more strategic thinking about the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of promoting family gardens in many water-scarce communities. On the one hand, family gardens should only be promoted in areas where water scarcity is not a problem; otherwise, programs must first resolve water accessibility issues, before trying to encourage garden adoption.
At the same time, food markets in rural areas already play an important role for nutritional outcomes, and their role will only strengthen as countries develop and move away from subsistence agriculture. Therefore, these types of programs need to understand how the additional production of fruits and vegetables could produce better markets.
In fact, remarkably few government or NGO interventions directly target food markets to improve their infrastructure, accessibility, efficiency, competitiveness and security. This is an important political gap given the critical importance of food markets for food and nutrition security in the developing world.
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