Shifts from maize to sorghum production: nutrition effects in four Mexican communities.

Abstract This paper examines how commercialization of agriculture, especially the production of sorghum as a cash crop, has affected household economic strategies and child nutritional status in four agrarian reform communities in Mexico. Growing sorghum as a cash crop over maize as a semi-subsistence crop has not placed the families of these small farmers in nutritional jeopardy, nor has it provided them with a significantly better situation. Access to basic productive resources, especially good-quality land, wage labour opportunities, ecological conditions, and agrarian and agricultural policy are more important than crop choice in determining the welfare of rural populations.