Abstract

Food poverty in developing countries remains a persistent and critical challenge, despite various initiatives meant to combat hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition. About 1 in 10 people globally still go to bed hungry, with an estimated 2.4 billion individuals experiencing food insecurity (FAO, 2024). Progress towards United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2)—to end hunger—has been slow (UN ECOSOC, 2024). This stagnation is further complicated by global megatrends such as conflicts, pandemics, and especially climate change (Anderson et al., 2021; Hasegawa et al., 2021). In Africa, recurring droughts and floods cause significant economic losses, estimated at US$5.1 billion, reduce national crop production by about 30% on average, and affect between 145 and 170 million people (Wollburg et al., 2024). Additionally, climate change intensifies environmental issues related to agriculture, such as deforestation, increased input use, greenhouse gas emissions, and biodiversity loss (Yang et al., 2024).

A significant challenge for agriculture is the ongoing decline in soil health and fertility, which directly impacts productivity (Giller et al., 2021; Vanlauwe et al., 2023). Under these circumstances, regenerative agriculture (RA) represents a promising approach. RA aims to restore and rebuild soil health, increase soil organic carbon, and enhance biodiversity, offering a pathway toward tackling these interconnected challenges (Gosnell et al., 2019; Smith et al., 2019; Dabalen et al., 2024). Healthy soils, in turn, can boost food and nutrition security (Lal, 2009; Schreefel et al., 2019). Investments in reversing land degradation are often driven by the pursuit of greater productivity and profitability (Stocking, 2003; Lal, 2009). Farmers adopting regenerative practices seek to increase yields, with the hope of securing economic and food security benefits (Lal, 2020). Furthermore, RA can recarbonize soils and sequester substantial amounts of underground carbon, making it a ready solution for climate variability and change (White, 2020). However, whether RA consistently delivers on its promise to improve food security remains unclear, with limited empirical evidence available.

This paper investigates the relationship between regenerative agriculture, dietary diversity, and food security. In particular, we assess how RA relates to farm production diversity, market participation, off-farm activities and income, and how these factors influence dietary diversity and household food security. We use the household dietary diversity score (HDDS) and the food consumption score (FCS) as measures of dietary diversity and food security, respectively. To capture nuances in consumption patterns, we also run disaggregated regressions that model the association between RA and individual food groups within the HDDS. Our analysis is based on a rich, two-wave, nationally representative panel dataset from Zambia, applying empirical strategies suitable for panel data, including the Mundlak-Chamberlain device and robust checks using a household fixed effect estimator.

We highlight four key findings:
• First, there is a positive association between regenerative agriculture and household dietary diversity, which reflects a higher quality of diet, especially regarding nutritious and healthy food choices.
• Second, RA is also positively associated with the food consumption score, indicating improvements in dietary quantity, quality, and to some extent, nutritional adequacy.
• Third, mechanisms such as farm production diversity, market participation, off-farm income, and income play an important role in explaining the relationship between RA, dietary diversity, and food consumption. RA is positively linked to these pathways, which themselves are associated with better dietary and food consumption outcomes.
• Finally, our analysis of heterogeneity reveals a positive association between RA and the consumption of pulses, roots and tubers, fruits and vegetables, and eggs. This underscores the importance of production diversity as a pathway linking RA to dietary diversity and food security. Notably, we find a negative association between RA and dairy consumption, which is typically sourced from markets rather than farm production (Ameye et al., 2021; Dzanku et al., 2024).

Our study contributes to the empirical literature in three key ways. First, it adds to the emerging research on regenerative agriculture and its impacts, a field that has been largely discussed conceptually but rarely explored with robust data (Dabalen et al., 2024). To our knowledge, this is the first study to empirically examine the connection between RA, dietary diversity, and food security. Second, our approach to measuring RA is comprehensive, considering a bundle of nine different regenerative practices—such as intercropping, crop rotation, earth bunds, minimum tillage, agroforestry, terraces, mulching, cover cropping, and contour farming—rather than focusing on individual practices in isolation. Third, the use of a large, two-period panel dataset (2015 and 2019) from Zambia allows us to capture adoption dynamics and control for time-invariant, unobserved heterogeneity.

In sum, the results suggest that regenerative agriculture holds significant promise for improving both environmental sustainability and household food security, particularly through its positive effects on dietary diversity and production diversity. Nevertheless, more research is needed to understand the full potential and limitations of RA in different settings and to clarify its relationship with food security outcomes across diverse contexts.