publications

Child marriages and unions in Latin America: understanding the roles of agency and social norms

Abstract
Purpose: Child marriages and unions can infringe upon adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health (AYSRH). Interventions increasingly promote strategies to transform social norms or foster the agency of adolescent girls. Recent empirical studies call for further understanding of how social norms and agency interact in ways that influence these practices, especially in contexts where girls’ agency is central. Methods: A secondary cross-case analysis of three qualitative studies (in Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras) was conducted to inform the investigation of how norms and agency may relate in sustaining or mitigating child marriage. Results: Social norms dictating how girls/young women and how men should act indirectly led to child marriages and unions. The data showed that (1) social norms regulated girls’ acceptable actions and contributed to their exercise of “oppositional” agency; (2) social norms promoted girls’ “accommodating” agency; and (3) girls exercised “transformative” agency to resist harmful social norms. Conclusions: Research should advance frameworks to conceptualize how social norms interact with agency in nuanced and context-specific ways. Practitioners should encourage equitable decision-making; offer confidential, adolescent-friendly AYSRH services; and address the social norms of parents, men and boys, and community members. ↑

Taylor, A.Y., Murphy-Graham, E., Van Horn, J., Vaitla, B., Del Valle, Á., Cislaghi, B., 2019. Child marriages and unions in Latin America: understanding the roles of agency and social norms. Journal of Adolescent Health 64, S45–S51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.12.017

Mycorrhizal fungi respond to resource inequality by moving phosphorus from rich to poor patches across networks

The world’s ecosystems are characterized by an unequal distribution of resources [1]. Trade partnerships between organisms of different species—mutualisms—can help individuals cope with such resource inequality [2, 3, 4]. Trade allows individuals to exchange commodities they can provide at low cost for resources that are otherwise impossible or more difficult to access [5, 6]. However, as resources become increasingly patchy in time or space, it is unknown how organisms alter their trading strategies [7, 8]. Here, we show how a symbiotic fungus mediates trade with a host root in response to different levels of resource inequality across its network. We developed a quantum-dot-tracking technique to quantify phosphorus-trading strategies of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi simultaneously exposed to rich and poor resource patches. By following fluorescent nanoparticles of different colors across fungal networks, we determined where phosphorus was hoarded, relocated, and transferred to plant hosts. We found that increasing exposure to inequality stimulated trade. Fungi responded to high resource variation by (1) increasing the total amount of phosphorus distributed to host roots, (2) decreasing allocation to storage, and (3) differentially moving resources within the network from rich to poor patches. Using single-particle tracking and high-resolution video, we show how dynamic resource movement may help the fungus capitalize on value differences across the trade network, physically moving resources to areas of high demand to gain better returns. Such translocation strategies can help symbiotic organisms cope with exposure to resource inequality. ↑

Whiteside, M.D., Werner, G.D.A., Caldas, V.E.A., van’t Padje, A., Dupin, S.E., Elbers, B., Bakker, M., Wyatt, G.A.K., Klein, M., Hink, M.A., Postma, M., Vaitla, B., Noë, R., Shimizu, T.S., West, S.A., Kiers, E.T., 2019. Mycorrhizal fungi respond to resource inequality by moving phosphorus from rich to poor patches across networks. Current Biology 29, 2043-2050.e8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.04.061

The impact of remittances on household food security: A micro perspective from Tigray, Ethiopia

While the volume of remittances to developing countries has been growing significantly over the years, the impact of remittances on food security has not received much attention. To bridge the gap this paper has examined the impact of remittances on farm household’s food security status, using a sample of 301 farm households from two livelihood zones of the Tigray Regional State of Ethiopia. The average treatment effect (ATT) results show that households with access to remittance have significantly lower Coping Strategy index (CSI), Reduced Coping Strategy index (rCSI) and Household Food Insecurity Access Scale (HFIAS) on average as compared to households without remittance income. However, there is no significant difference in the ATT effect of remittances on Food Consumption Score (FCS) between treated and control households. These findings suggest that remittances lower the frequency and the severity of coping strategies, and households with remittances have i) lower anxiety about not being able to procure sufficient food; ii) higher ability to secure adequate quality food; and iii) lower experience of insufficient quantity of food intake than those without remittance. Thus, it is imperative to include migration and remittances as important components of food security programs and food security policies in Ethiopia and should go beyond just food production measures, and include measures that help in generating adequate levels of effective demand via income growth or transfers policies. ↑

*Abadi, N., Techane, A., Tesfay, G., Maxwell, D., and Vaitla, B., 2018. UNU Wider Working Papers 2018/40. Avaliable at https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/190089/1/wp2018-040.pdf

Climate change and global food systems: potential impacts on food security and undernutrition

Great progress has been made in addressing global undernutrition over the past several decades, in part because of large increases in food production from agricultural expansion and intensification. Food systems, however, face continued increases in demand and growing environmental pressures. Most prominently, human-caused climate change will influence the quality and quantity of food we produce and our ability to distribute it equitably. Our capacity to ensure food security and nutritional adequacy in the face of rapidly changing biophysical conditions will be a major determinant of the next century’s global burden of disease. In this article, we review the main pathways by which climate change may affect our food production systems—agriculture, fisheries, and livestock—as well as the socioeconomic forces that may influence equitable distribution. ↑

*Myers, S.S., Smith, M.R., Guth, S., Golden, C.D., Vaitla, B., Mueller, N.D., Dangour, A.D., Huybers, P., 2017. Climate change and global food systems: potential impacts on food security and undernutrition. Annual Review of Public Health 38, 259–277. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031816-044356

A non-equilibrium formulation of food security resilience

Resilience, the ability to recover from adverse events, is of fundamental importance to food security. This is especially true in poor countries, where basic needs are frequently threatened by economic, environmental and health shocks. An empirically sound formalization of the concept of food security resilience, however, is lacking. Here, we introduce a general non-equilibrium framework for quantifying resilience based on the statistical notion of persistence. Our approach can be applied to any food security variable for which high- frequency time-series data are available. We illustrate our method with per capita kilocalorie availability for 161 countries between 1961 and 2011. We find that resilient countries are not necessarily those that are characterized by high levels or less volatile fluctuations of kilocalorie intake. Accordingly, food security policies and programmes will need to be tailored not only to welfare levels at any one time, but also to long-run welfare dynamics. ↑

*Smerlak, M., Vaitla, B., 2018. A non-equilibrium formulation of food security resilience. Royal Society Open Science 4, 160874. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160874

Ecosystem services and food security: assessing inequality at community, household and individual scales

Wildlife populations provide harvestable meat to people and contribute to local food security. Throughout the year, and particularly at times of agricultural food shortages, wildlife and other wild foods play a critical role in supporting food security and enhancing local human nutrition. We explored the distribution of food security benefits of agricultural food production and a particular ecosystem provisioning service – wildlife harvest in the Makira Natural Park (MNP) of Madagascar – at community, household and individual levels. We found strong variation in wildlife consumption both among communities and among households and less variation among individuals within households. Mean household wildlife consumption in the target community was 10 kg per year ranging by approximately two orders of magnitude, with poorer and more food insecure households more reliant on wildlife for food. Meats (including wildlife) appeared to be evenly distributed within households, unaffected by age, sex, birth order and body weight, while other foods (including stew, rice and other staples) appeared to be allocated based on body mass. Reductions in wildlife consumption cause increased risk of food insecurity and specific nutritional deficiencies. The findings from our multilevel study suggest that disaggregated analysis that merges ecosystem services theory and the microeconomics of resource allocation allows for a more accurate valuation approach. ↑

Golden, C.D., Gupta, A.C., Vaitla, B., & Myers, S.S. 2016. Ecosystem services and food security: assessing inequality at community, household and individual scales. Environmental Conservation 43(4), 381-388. doi:10.1017/S0376892916000163

Comparing household food consumption indicators to inform acute food insecurity phase classification

To analyze the relationships among select household food consumption indicators, FANTA and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) initiated a household food consumption indicators study (HFCIS) based on available secondary data. The HFCIS made use of 65,089 household-level observations from 21 representative, population-level datasets spanning 10 countries: Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Mongolia, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Data used in the analysis were collected between 2008 and 2013 and contained at least two of the following indicators: the Coping Strategies Index (CSI), the Reduced Coping Strategies Index (rCSI), the Food Consumption Score (FCS), the Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), and the Household Hunger Score (HHS). The indicators studied reflect different aspects of food security. The results of these analyses were interpreted to indicate that the experiential indicators studied (HHS and rCSI) are likely to be stronger proxies of diet quantity while the diet diversity indicators (HDDS and FCS) are likely to be stronger measures of diet quality. This split warns against using these two groups of indicators interchangeably as indicators of acute food consumption outcomes and suggests relying on at least one indicator from each group for more accurate classification. ↑

Vaitla, B., Coates, J., and Maxwell, D., 2015. Comparing Household Food Consumption Indicators to Inform Acute Food Insecurity Phase Classification. Washington, DC: FHI 360/Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III Project (FANTA). https://www.fantaproject.org/sites/default/files/resources/HFCIS-report-Dec2015.pdf

Resilience, food security dynamics, and poverty traps in northern Ethiopia: analysis of a biannual panel data set

This report summarizes the findings of the “Livelihood Change over Time” study conducted jointly by the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University in the US and the College of Dryland Agriculture and Natural Resources at Mekelle University in Ethiopia. Following two seasons of qualitative data collection, the LCOT study consisted of four rounds of a household survey over two years (two rounds in the “hunger” season and two rounds in the “postharvest” season) in four different locations in two woredas in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia. The study tracked household food security status over time, as well as changes in livelihoods and in particular the dynamics of asset accumulation or loss. Over the course of the study, food security indicators improved steadily. We analyze the determinants of changes in food security status from round to round over time. While different indicators of food security tell a somewhat divergent story in terms of the estimates of prevalence, they tell a remarkably similar story in terms of change over time. There was not a corresponding improvement in the level of assets at the household level. This suggests that asset accumulation in both livelihood zones studied may be complicated by the presence of poverty traps, and that most households may be below the critical threshold beyond which the poverty traps theory suggests that growth becomes self-sustaining. The poverty traps analysis confirms a low-level equilibrium in asset holdings over time. Households below this threshold tend to accumulate assets up to this level but then are unable to continue growing. Wealthier households show some tendency to regress back to this point. This trend is most evident in the period between the hunger season and the postharvest season—the precise period in which food security indicators show the most improvement. ↑

Maxwell, D., Vaitla, B., Tesfay, G., & Abadi, N., 2013. Resilience, food security dynamics and poverty traps in northern Ethiopia. Analysis of a biannual panel data set, 2011–2013. Somerville, MA: Feinstein International Center, Tufts University.

How do different indicators of household food security compare? Empirical evidence from Tigray

With recent food crises at both regional and global levels, and renewed commitments from major donor countries to address chronic hunger, food security is more prominent on the policy agenda today than it has been in the past. This has intensified the search for accurate, rapid, and consistent indicators of food security. Different measures of the access dimension of food insecurity are used interchangeably, without a good idea of which food-security dimensions are captured by which measures, increasing the risk that the number of food-insecure individuals is underestimated. This paper draws on four rounds of data from a panel survey of 300 rural households in northern Ethiopia to compare seven different measures collected across all rounds: (1) Coping Strategies Index (CSI); (2) Reduced Coping Strategies Index (rCSI); (3) Household Food Insecurity and Access Scale (HFIAS); (4) The Household Hunger Scale (HHS); (5) Food Consumption Score (FCS); (6) Household Dietary Diversity Scale (HDDS); and (7) a self-assessed measure of food security (SAFS). 1) How do the seven measures listed below compare—do they tell the same “story” about household food insecurity and classify households similarly? 2) Which elements of food insecurity does each of these measures capture? 3) How can metrics be combined or used in complementary ways to yield a more multidimensional picture of a household’s food insecurity situation? The answers to the questions posed in this study have implications for (1) which measure, or which combinations of measures, is more appropriate for a given purpose and (2) the costs of relying on single measures or indicators, in terms of potential misclassification of the food-insecure. ↑

Maxwell, D., Coates, J., & Vaitla, B., 2013. How do different indicators of household food security compare? Empirical evidence from Tigray. Somerville, MA: Feinstein International Center, Tufts University. Available at https://fic.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/Different-Indicators-of-HFS.pdf

Seasonal hunger: a neglected with proven solutions

Most of the world’s acute hunger and undernutrition occurs not in conflicts and natural disasters but in the annual ‘‘hunger season,’’ the time of year when the previous year’s harvest stocks have dwindled, food prices are high, and jobs are scarce. We know what works in fighting seasonal hunger and undernutrition: there are identifiable policy and program successes in contexts around the world, but they often operate on a small scale and in isolation. Community-based interventions to treat acute undernutrition and promote growth of preschool children are examples of successful interventions that should be scaled up. Global scale-up of a basic ‘‘minimum essential’’ intervention package against seasonal hunger would cost around 0.1% of global GDP and save millions of lives, while protecting millions more from severe illness. Focusing on seasonal hunger would be an effective way to leverage resources for the attainment of the hunger-related Millennium Development Goal. ↑

Vaitla, B., Devereux, S., & Swan, S.H., 2009. Seasonal hunger: a neglected problem with proven solutions. PLoS medicine, 6(6), e1000101. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000101

The justice of eating: Hunger Watch report 2007-8

This is the first Hunger Watch report from humanitarian organization Action Against Hunger, a leading NGO in the fight against hunger and malnutrition. It presents an accessible, jargon-free account of the causes and consequences of malnutrition around the world. The report highlights that hunger is a largely invisible violation of human dignity and social justice. It assesses why, in a world of abundance, acute malnutrition continues to exist, reminding us that the persistence of hunger is an indignity to us all. Through case studies, the report examines the impact of various forces on malnutrition, focusing on conflict and the destruction of livelihoods in the Darfur region of Sudan, unstable markets in Niger, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Malawi and Zambia. ↑

Hauenstein-Swan, S., & Vaitla, B., 2008. The justice of eating: the struggle for food and dignity in recent humanitarian crises. London: Pluto Press. ISBN: 978-0745327464.

Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveal lifestyles in urban populations

Zipf-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics, biology, economics, and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf’s law describes, for example, the frequency of appearance of words in a text or the purchase types in shopping patterns. In the latter, the uneven distribution of transaction types is bound with the temporal sequences of purchases of individual choices. In this work, we define a framework using a text compression technique on the sequences of credit card purchases to detect ubiquitous patterns of collective behavior. Clustering the consumers by their similarity in purchase sequences, we detect five consumer groups. Remarkably, post checking, individuals in each group are also similar in their age, total expenditure, gender, and the diversity of their social and mobility networks extracted from their mobile phone records. By properly deconstructing transaction data with Zipf-like distributions, this method uncovers sets of significant sequences that reveal insights on collective human behavior. ↑

*Di Clemente, R., Luengo-Oroz, M., Travizano, M., Xu, S., Vaitla, B., González, M.C., 2018. Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveal lifestyles in urban populations. Nature Communications 9, 3330. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05690-8

Cohort profile: The Madagascar Health and Environmental Research (MAHERY) study in north-eastern Madagascar

The Madagascar Health and Environmental Research (MAHERY) study cohort was set up in 2004 to understand the human health impacts of environmental change (e.g. deforestation, unsustainable hunting, biodiversity loss, climate change etc.) in Madagascar. There was a particular focus on the role of local people in rainforested areas of north-eastern Madagascar (near the city of Maroantsetra) in depleting the stocks of wild foods and how that may affect nutritional status. The cohort also provides an opportunity to understand the interactive dynamics between wildlife hunting, dietary intake, nutritional status, the human faecal microbiome and the incidence of intestinal parasites, zoonotic pathogens and malaria. It is notoriously difficult to characterize the diet of individuals over long time scales because food frequency questionnaires and 24-h recall can be inaccurate for capturing seasonally variable diets. ↑

*Golden, C.D., Anjaranirina, E.J.G., Fernald, L.C., Hartl, D.L., Kremen, C., Milner Jr, D.A., Ralalason, D.H., Ramihantaniarivo, H., Randriamady, H., Rice, B.L., Vaitla, B., Volkman, S.K., Vonona, M.A., Myers, S.S., 2017. Cohort profile: The Madagascar Health and Environmental Research (MAHERY) study in north-eastern Madagascar. International Journal of Epidemiology 46, 1747–1748d. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyx071

Impacts of mainstream hydropower development on fisheries and human nutrition in the Lower Mekong

Dams provide energy and irrigation water, but also alter natural water flows that support fisheries. This tradeoff presents a risk for human nutrition in regions dependent on aquatic foods, including the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB), where over 100 dams are planned or in construction. Previous models estimate significant reductions in fishery production resulting from these dams. This study estimates the number of new nutritionally insecure people (i.e., those at risk for nutritional deficiencies) associated with Mekong damming. We calculated population-level nutritional needs based on the Estimated Average Requirements (EARs) for Cambodia and the entire LMB. We then estimated fish-derived nutrient supplies by integrating data on annual fishery production and fish nutrient content for a wide range of species. Finally, we synthesized available literature and modeling results on the impacts of damming on fisheries production, and estimated the consequent impact on inadequate intakes of protein, zinc, niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, and calcium, as well as potential vulnerability to losses of dietary iron. Hydropower development could restrict access to subsistence fish from the Mekong River Basin and lead to increased risk of nutritional deficiencies in Cambodia and the LMB. Our median estimates suggest that by 2030, relative to 2010, inadequate intakes could lead to an increased population at risk of nutritional deficiencies in the LMB by 0.21 to 2.23 million people for protein, 0.12 to 1.17 million people for zinc, 0.41 to 1.58 million people for niacin, 0.47 to 0.87 million people for thiamin, 0.70 to 2.31 million people for riboflavin, and approximately 10,000 people for calcium. This increased population at risk is additional to those currently malnourished. We then calculated that the average iron intake of many age-sex groups (constituting 58% of the population) will be below 150% of their EAR in 2030, indicating a potential risk of increased inadequate iron intake. Fish is the main source of animal source foods and critical micronutrients in the LMB. In the absence of mitigation efforts, any reductions in fishery production could increase already high levels of nutrient deficiency, creating a widespread risk of nutrition insecurity. ↑

*Golden, C.D., Shapero, A., Vaitla, B., Smith, M.R., Myers, S.S., Stebbins, E., & Gephart, J.A., 2019. Impacts of mainstream hydropower development on fisheries and human nutrition in the Lower Mekong. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 3, 93. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00093

Cohort description of the Madagascar Health and Environmental Research–Antongil (MAHERY–Antongil) study in Madagascar

The Madagascar Health and Environmental Research-Antongil (MAHERY-Antongil) study cohort was set up in September 2015 to assess the nutritional value of seafood for the coastal Malagasy population living along Antongil Bay in northeastern Madagascar. Over 28 months of surveillance, we aimed to understand the relationships among different marine resource governance models, local people’s fish catch, the consumption of seafood, and nutritional status. In the Antongil Bay, fisheries governance takes three general forms: traditional management, marine national parks, and co-management. Traditional management involves little to no involvement by the national government or non-governmental organizations, and focuses on culturally accepted Malagasy community practices. Co-management and marine national parks involve management support from either an non-governmental organization (NGO) or the national government. Five communities of varying governance strategies were enrolled into the study including 225 households and 1031 individuals whose diets, resource acquisition strategies, fisheries and agricultural practices, and other social, demographic and economic indicators were measured over the span of 3 years. Clinical visits with each individual were conducted at two points during the study to measure disease and nutritional status. By analyzing differences in fish catch arising from variation in governance (in addition to intra-annual seasonal changes and minor inter-annual changes), the project will allow us to calculate the public health value of sustainable fisheries management approaches for local populations. There is hope that coastal zones that are managed sustainably can increase the productivity of fisheries, increasing the catch of seafood products for poor, undernourished populations. ↑

*Golden, C.D., Borgerson, C., Rice, B.L., Allen, L.H., Anjaranirina, E.J.G., Barrett, C.B., Boateng, G., Gephart, J.A., Hampel, D., Hartl, D.L., Knippenberg, E., Myers, S.S., Ralalason, D.H., Ramihantaniarivo, H., Randriamady, H., Shahab-Ferdows, S., Vaitla, B., Volkman, S.K., Vonona, M.A., 2019. Cohort description of the Madagascar Health and Environmental Research–Antongil (MAHERY–Antongil) study in Madagascar. Frontiers in Nutrition 6, 109. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2019.00109

Predicting nutrient content of ray-finned fishes using phylogenetic information

Human food and nutrition security is dependent on marine ecosystems threatened by overfishing, climate change, and other processes. The consequences on human nutritional status are uncertain, in part because current methods of analyzing fish nutrient content are expensive. Here, we evaluate the possibility of predicting nutrient content of ray-finned fishes using existing phylogenetic and life history information. We focus on nutrients for which fish are important sources: protein, total fat, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, iron, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin B12, and vitamin D. Our results show that life history traits are weak predictors of species nutrient content, but phylogenetic relatedness is associated with similar nutrient profiles. Further, we develop a method for predicting the nutrient content of 7500+ species based on phylogenetic relationships to species with known nutrient content. Our approach is a cost-effective means for estimating potential changes in human nutrient intake associated with altered access to ray-finned fishes. ↑

*Vaitla, B., Collar, D., Smith, M.R., Myers, S.S., Rice, B.L., Golden, C.D., 2018. Predicting nutrient content of ray-finned fishes using phylogenetic information. Nature Communications 9, 3742. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06199-w

Does aquaculture support the needs of nutritionally vulnerable nations?

Aquaculture now supplies half of the fish consumed directly by humans. We evaluate whether aquaculture, given current patterns of production and distribution, supports the needs of poor and food-insecure populations throughout the world. We begin by identifying 41 seafood-reliant nutritionally vulnerable nations (NVNs), and ask whether aquaculture meets human nutritional demand directly via domestic production or trade, or indirectly via purchase of nutritionally rich dietary substitutes. We find that a limited number of NVNs have domestically farmed seafood, and of those, only specific aquaculture approaches (e.g., freshwater) in some locations have the potential to benefit nutritionally vulnerable populations. While assessment of aquaculture’s direct contribution via trade is constrained by data limitations, we find that it is unlikely to contribute substantially to human nutrition in vulnerable groups, as most exported aquaculture consists of high-value species for international markets. We also determine that subpopulations who benefit from aquaculture profits are likely not the same subpopulations who are nutritionally vulnerable, and more research is needed to understand the impacts of aquaculture income gains. Finally, we discuss the relationship of aquaculture to existing trends in capture fisheries in NVNs, and suggest strategies to create lasting solutions to nutritional security, without exacerbating existing challenges in access to food and land resources. ↑

*Golden, C.D., Seto, K.L., Dey, M.M., Chen, O.L., Gephart, J.A., Myers, S.S., Smith, M., Vaitla, B., Allison, E.H., 2017. Does aquaculture support the needs of nutritionally vulnerable nations? Frontiers in Marine Science 4, 159. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2017.00159

Seasonal trends of nutrient intake in rainforest communities of north-eastern Madagascar

Objective: We collected dietary records over the course of nine months to comprehensively characterize the consumption patterns of Malagasy people living in remote rainforest areas of north-eastern Madagascar. Design: The present study was a prospective longitudinal cohort study to estimate dietary diversity and nutrient intake for a suite of macronutrients, micronutrients and vitamins for 152 randomly selected households in two communities. Setting: Madagascar, with over 25 million people living in an area the size of France, faces a multitude of nutritional challenges. Micronutrient-poor staples, especially rice, roots and tubers, comprise nearly 80 % of the Malagasy diet by weight. The remaining dietary components (including wild foods and animal-source foods) are critical for nutrition. We focus our study in north-eastern Madagascar, characterized by access to rainforest, rice paddies and local agriculture. Participants: We enrolled men, women and children of both sexes and all ages in a randomized sample of households in two communities. Results: Although the Household Dietary Diversity Score and Food Consumption Score reflect high dietary diversity, the Minimum Dietary Diversity–Women indicator suggests poor micronutrient adequacy. The food intake data confirm a mixed nutritional picture. We found that the median individual consumed less than 50% of his/her age/sex-specific Estimated Average Requirement (EAR) for vitamins A, B12, D and E, and Ca, and less than 100 % of his/her EAR for energy, riboflavin, folate and Na. Conclusions: Malnutrition in remote communities of north-eastern Madagascar is pervasive and multidimensional, indicating an urgent need for comprehensive public health and development interventions focused on providing nutritional security. ↑

*Golden, C.D., Vaitla, B., Ravaoliny, L., Vonona, M.A., Anjaranirina, E.G., Randriamady, H.J., Glahn, R.P., Guth, S.E., Fernald, L.C., & Myers, S.S., 2019. Seasonal trends of nutrient intake in rainforest communities of north-eastern Madagascar. Public Health Nutrition 22, 2200–2209. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980019001083

Fishing for health: do the world’s national policies for fisheries and aquaculture align with those for nutrition?

Abstract
Aquatic foods are rich in micronutrients essential to human health, and fisheries and aquaculture are increasingly recognized for their capacity to contribute to reducing global micronutrient deficiencies and diet-based health risks. Whether fisheries and aquaculture sector and public health nutrition policies align to meet this goal, however, is unclear. Do fisheries and aquaculture policies have explicit nutrition and public health objectives? Do public health nutrition policies recognize the contribution of aquatic foods? Using content analysis, we assessed the alignment of objectives in national fisheries and public health nutrition policies. We further determined conditions associated with varying levels of cohesion among policies in these sectors or domains. We found that 77 of 158 national fisheries policies identified nutrition as a key objective in the sector, and 68 of 165 public health nutrition policies identified the importance of fish and shellfish consumption as key objectives. More recent policies were associated with improved coherence among sectors. International organization presence in policy development was also associated with greater coherence. Countries with higher overweight prevalence had fisheries and public health nutrition policies that were not aligned. There has been a promising recent trend for improved alignment of objectives between fisheries and public health nutrition policies, but more targeted and systematic policy approaches are needed to realize the potential contribution of nutrient-rich fish and shellfish to healthier food systems. ↑

Koehn, J. Z., Allison, E. H., Villeda, K., Chen, Z., Nixon, M., Crigler, E., Zhao, L., Chow, M., Vaitla, B., Thilsted, S. H., Scholtens, J., Hicks, C. C., & Andrew, N., 2022. Fishing for health: Do the world’s national policies for fisheries and aquaculture align with those for nutrition? Fish and Fisheries 23, 125– 142. https://doi.org/10.1111/faf.12603

Poverty and random walks

In this paper, we explore simple mechanisms for the persistence of poverty, in particular the effects of random chance and variation in rates of return to existing wealth operating over empirically relevant time frames. We run a series of agent-based simulations to investigate these topics, calibrating key agent variables and system parameters to fall within ranges conforming to empirical values from a recently collected dataset of rural Ethiopian households. A variety of factors are responsible for the persistence of poverty, ranging from missing markets to poverty traps embedded in the shape of production functions. The simulations in this paper do not challenge the existence of these multiple forces, but rather suggest that a significant proportion of poverty dynamics can be explained by even simpler mechanisms. Chief among these is the role of stochasticity. We constructed our simulation to model daily subsistence-level transactions among a food-insecure population of northern Ethiopia. While the simulations do abstract considerably—for example, the majority income flows in this area are heavily lumpy, occurring around one to two harvest times a year, although some income is obtained daily or weekly from wage labor and sales of stored produce—they nonetheless suggest that wealth dynamics are affected by random chance, which tends to “push against” equality. A random walk with an expected wealth change of zero at each time step, quickly pushes uniform distributions towards normality over a 5-year period; as seen in Simulation 1; thus even strong redistributive mechanisms will have to confront this countervailing force of random chance. The squared poverty gap increases slightly, highlighting the impact of these dynamics on a small proportion of very unlucky individuals, which ultimately fall into severe poverty. ↑

Al-Sayegh, A., et al. 2013. Poverty and random walks: simple mechanisms underlying human development. (Preprint manuscript from the Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School).