Adoption of agricultural innovations is perceived as a key avenue for poverty reduction
and improved food and nutritional security in developing countries. The International
Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (
icipe) has developed and implemented a set
of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategies in several sub-Saharan African countries
aimed at controlling mango infesting fruit flies (
Bactrocera dorsalis
). Although positive
returns from the use of fruit fly IPM have already been documented, the impact of these
technologies on food security is not well understood. This study evaluated the impact of
the IPM strategy on food security with the help of a two-wave panel household survey
data collected in Machakos County in Kenya. A difference-in-difference model was
fitted to the data of a randomly selected sample of 600 mango growing households. A
seven-day recall was used to elicit per capita calorie intake, while a 30-day recall was
used to measure household dietary diversity. A before-and-after intervention and withand-without (treatment and control) study design was utilized. The regression estimates
indicate that fruit fly IPM use had a positive impact on per capita calorie intake but no
significant effect on Household Dietary Diversity Index (HDDI) in comparison with the
IPM non-users. This suggests that farmers using the fruit fly IPM technology benefit
from income gains, and higher incomes improve the quantity of food consumed but not
the diversity of the foods. This could be explained by a large share of the expenditure on
food that was devoted to cereal staples such as maize, wheat, and rice as reported during
the qualitative study. Other factors that had an effect on per capita calorie include the
level of farm income, access to the extension services, wealth category and distance to
agricultural input market and household size. This study recommends wider
dissemination and upscaling of the fruit fly IPM strategy in mango producing regions to
facilitate broader impacts on household-level food security.
