Paper short abstract:

I will address the potential measures to tackle the nutritional food security of rural households via diversifying agricultural production. The proposed research employs the farming system lens to scrutinise the intricate relationships between production and consumption in a semi-arid climate.

Paper long abstract:

Food insecurity and undernutrition persist as crucial challenges in Indian agriculture despite substantial growth in food production over the past decades. Although India has achieved national-level food security, household and intra-household food insecurity bother the policymakers. The concern becomes considerably daunting when 50% of the workforce depends on agriculture for consumption. Due to the high dependence on agriculture, diversifying the crop and livestock production would be a cost-efficient strategy to improve dietary diversity for improved nutrition. In this context, the study examines the impacts of agricultural diversification on dietary diversity in rain-fed and irrigated farming systems.

The study employs a quantitative and qualitative approach to understand the complexity of farming decisions for household consumption and market production in rain-fed and irrigated farming systems. The study used cross-sectional, semi-structured, in-depth household-level surveys to interview 442 households in four villages of the Akole block, Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, India, followed by qualitative interviews.

The findings suggest that agricultural production and dietary diversity interplay differently in different farming systems; rainfed systems have a higher value than irrigated ones. In addition, the role of the market is more detrimental to production and consumption decisions in irrigated farming systems than in rain-fed market systems. The relationship is supplemented by technological adoption, adding better technological augmentation that positively affects production-consumption decisions. The market influence on the consumption relationship reflects that derived income from agriculture has a better role in consumption choices. However, the landholding size and irrigation resources access affect the production-consumption decision differently.