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Research Papers
Monitoring and surveillance
'As a dimension of poverty, seasonality is as glaringly obvious as it is still grossly neglected. Attempts to embed its recognition in professional mindsets, policy and practice have still a long way to go.'
Robert Chambers(1)
Seasonality in food consumption patterns in developing countries attracted considerable research attention in the 1990s and early 2000s. Nutritionists and other researchers documented substantial intra-annual fluctuations in children's and adults' anthropometric measures(2-6). Economists found how various welfare indicators, such as consumption, incomes and prices, moved together with the agricultural seasons in many developing countries(7-10). This body of research greatly improved our understanding of the seasonal stress that rural households in low-income countries face(11). It also provided methodological insights into administering household surveys in developing country settings(12). After these contributions were made, seasonality generally has received less research attention and has been largely neglected in policy arenas(13). Kaminski et al.(14)conjectured that this is partly due to the (mis)perception that local food markets are now well integrated in much of the developing world.
An emerging body of literature emphasizes the role of diet quality on various health and nutrition outcomes. Diet quality is typically measured through dietary diversity scores that count the number of food groups consumed in the previous 24 h to past 7 d(15-17). Low diversity in diets is found to be associated with increased risk of chronic undernutrition among children(15,18), Fe deficiency among children and adult women(19,20)and mortality from cancer and CVD(21). Dietary diversity is also considered a good indicator of food security(22,23). The importance of diet quality is now well acknowledged in the nutrition community(24,25).
Despite this growing emphasis on diet quality in developing countries, limited evidence exists on how diet quality changes with the agricultural seasons. Most of the existing evidence comes from Burkina Faso. Savy et al.(26)studied seasonality and dietary diversity...