Deforestation reduces fruit and vegetable in rural Tanzania

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 center dot d21, 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.

Automated summary

This study examines the impact of deforestation and forest fragmentation on people's dietary quality in rural Tanzania and finds that deforestation leads to a reduction in fruit and vegetable consumption, while forest fragmentation increases the consumption of these foods and dietary vitamin A adequacy.