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  • Publication | 2023

Household dairy production, dairy intake, and anthropometric outcomes in rural Bangladesh

Global Food and Nutrition Security

Highlights:

  • Using household survey data from rural Bangladesh, we examine whether ownership of dairy cows is associated with a greater likelihood of consuming dairy products and with child anthropometric status in rural Bangladesh.
  • Consistent with the assumption of imperfectly functioning markets for dairy products, ownership of dairy cows increases the likelihood that a child 6–59 months consumes milk by 7.7 percentage points with no difference in this association between boys and girls. This association nearly doubles in magnitude when we consider households that own a dairy cow that produced milk in the last year.
  • Dairy cow ownership is associated with an increase of 0.13 SD in height-for-age z scores (HAZ). For children in the 12–23.9 month age group, ownership of a dairy cow is associated with a 0.37 SD increase in HAZ and a reduction of 11.3 percentage points in stunting. There is no statistically significant association with weight-for-height or wasting.
  • These associations do not differ between boys and girls. However, when dairy cows are owned solely by a female head or a woman who is the spouse of the head, there is suggestive evidence that the association between female ownership and HAZ is larger for boys than for girls.
  • In rural Bangladesh, access to dairy products through ownership of dairy cattle is associated with both increased likelihood that infants and young children consume these nutrient dense foods and improved nutritional status. But because most rural children reside in homes where these dairy cows are not present, devising gender-sensitive ways of increasing access to these foods – for example, through increased local production and dairy value chain development - represents an important area for future intervention design and research.

Abstract:

We assess whether ownership of dairy cows is associated with a greater likelihood of consuming dairy products and with child anthropometric status in rural Bangladesh. Consistent with the assumption of imperfectly functioning markets for dairy products, ownership of dairy cows increases the likelihood that a child 6–59 months consumes milk by 7.7 percentage points with no difference in this association between boys and girls. This association nearly doubles in magnitude when we consider households that own a dairy cow that produced milk in the last year. This result is robust to the controls we use and the way in which we measure dairy cow ownership. Even when we saturate our model with child, maternal, household, wealth, as well as village fixed effects, we retain an association between dairy cow ownership and height-for-age z scores (HAZ) that is meaningful in magnitude – 0.13 standard deviations – and statistically significant at the one percent level. For children in the 12–23.9 month age group, ownership of a dairy cow is associated with a 0.37 SD increase in HAZ and a reduction of 11.3 percentage points in stunting. There is no statistically significant association with weight-for-height or wasting. These associations do not differ between boys and girls.