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Flores-Martinez, Artemisa, Zanello, Giacomo, Shankar, Bhavani and Poole, Nigel (2016) 'Reducing Anemia Prevalence in Afghanistan: Socioeconomic Correlates and the Particular Role of Agricultural Assets.' PLoS ONE, 11 (6). 0156878.

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Abstract

This research aims to examine the socio-economic correlates of anemia in women, and potential sources of iron in household diets in Afghanistan. It also examines whether ownership of agricultural (particularly livestock) assets and their use in food production has a role in alleviating anaemia, especially where local markets may be inadequate. We analyse data from the 2010/11 Afghanistan Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, estimating a logistic regression to examine how anemia status of women is associated with socio-economic covariates. A key result found is that sheep ownership has a protective effect in reducing anemia (prevalence odds ratio of sheep ownership on anemia of 0.83, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.73–0.94) after controlling for wealth and other covariates. This association is found to be robust to alternative model specifications. Given the central role of red meat in heme iron provision and absorption of non-heme iron, we hypothesise that sheep ownership promotes mutton consumption from own-production in a setting where market-sourced provision of nutritious food is a challenge. We then use the 2011/12 National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment household data to understand the Afghan diet from the perspective of dietary iron provision, and to understand interactions between own-production, market sourcing and mutton consumption. Sheep ownership is found to increase the likelihood that a household consumed mutton (odds ratio of 1.27, 95% CI: 1.15–1.42), the number of days in the week that mutton was consumed (prevalence rate ratio of 1.24. 95% CI: 1.12–1.37) and the quantity of mutton consumed (7 grams/person/week). In the subsample of mutton consumers, households sourcing mutton mostly from own production consumed mutton 1.5 days more frequently on average than households relying on market purchase, resulting in 100 grams per person per week higher mutton intake. Thus this analysis lends support to the notion that the linkage between sheep ownership and anemia risk is at least partly due to consumption arising from own-production in the presence of market incompleteness.

Item Type: Journal Article
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > Interdisciplinary Studies > Centre for Development, Environment and Policy
Legacy Departments > Faculty of Law and Social Sciences > School of Finance and Management > Centre for Development, Environment and Policy (CeDEP)
ISSN: 19326203
Copyright Statement: © 2016 Flores-Martinez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0156878
Date Deposited: 07 Jun 2016 11:56
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/22589

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