Off-farm employment, agriculture production activities, and household dietary diversity in environmentally and economically vulnerable areas of Asia

Abstract

Access to off-farm employment has been expected to be a critical approach to ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition, two important targets of achieving Zero Hunger. This study aims to investigate the role of off-farm employment in improving dietary diversity through substitution effect and complementary effect with agricultural production activities and income effect. This study adopts Poisson/Tobit/Probit/OLS regressions and the instrument variable method based on the primary survey data collected among 1,282 households at 12 sites in environmentally and economically vulnerable areas of China, Nepal, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar in 2019. The results show that off-farm employment is positively associated with household dietary diversity and the consumption of flesh meat, fish and other aquatic animals, fruits, and milk and dairy products, which are rich in protein and micronutrients. The results of mechanism analysis show that off-farm employment contributes to household dietary diversity by improving crop diversity, especially for poor households, boosting the probability of livestock raising for households with the middle one-third disposal income, and increasing household income. The positive association between off-farm employment and household dietary diversity is much higher for households with the bottom one-third disposal income, low illiteracy, and from upper-middle income countries. These findings imply that off-farm employment does play a vital role in achieving multiple benefits of poverty alleviation, malnutrition reduction, and agrobiodiversity conservation in environmentally and economically vulnerable areas. However, it may enlarge the gaps in dietary diversity between households with low human capital and from low and lower-middle income countries and those with high human capital and from middle-high countries.

Keywords

• off-farm employment
• dietary diversity
• income effect
• substitution effect
• complementary effect