THREE ESSAYS ON AGRICULTURE, GENDER AND NUTRITION IN TANZANIA

The dissertation comprises of three essays on agriculture, gender and nutrition. Although the essays are separate, they focus on interrelated topics and help build a case for common policy prescriptions. In the first chapter I examine gender differences in agricultural productivity using panel data for Tanzania. At the national level there is weak evidence of mean differences in productivity between male and female plots, but conditional on manager characteristics, plot characteristics, inputs, crop choice, and household-year fixed effects, plots managed solely by a woman are about 29 percent less productive than all other plots. The gap is similar even when controls for plot and plot-crop fixed effects are included suggesting that plot quality or crop choice do not fully explain the gap. An Oaxaca-Blinder type decomposition reveals that quantitatively the most important factors explaining the gender differential are plot area and labor. Women are able to obtain higher yields on smaller plots farmed with less male labor and more female labor and thus cover the gender gap in productivity at the aggregate level. The fact that observable factors of production matter most for the gender gap provides clear policy levers to improve agricultural outcomes for women in Tanzania. In the second chapter I explore how higher agricultural production affects the nutrition of children of different ages and adults in agricultural households. Unlike previous studies which approximate nutritional status with calorie intake or food diversity, I measure nutritional status with anthropometric data. I find that agricultural production has a positive and statistically significant effect on the nutrition of children under age 10. The effects persist even after controlling for the socioeconomic status of the households. Higher agricultural production is linked to better long-term indicators of nutrition (height-for-age) among the youngest children and better short-term indicators of nutrition (BMI-for-age and weight-for-age) among older children. Agriculture is also linked to better nutrition for girls but not for boys. The findings have important implications about the potential of agriculture to alleviate both chronic and temporary incidences of undernutrition.The third chapter extends the analysis on the linkages between agricultural production and child nutrition by explicitly considering the mediating role of the gender of the farm decision maker. The findings provide clear evidence that the gender of the farm decision maker plays an important role as a mediator between agriculture and child nutrition. I find compelling evidence of a positive association between livestock ownership and better child nutrition with the largest effect for children less than 24 months of age living on female-managed farms. Livestock is also positively associated with longer-run measures of nutrition as evidenced by the negative association between past livestock ownership and the probability of stunting among 5 to 9 year olds. The long-run nutritional benefits of living on female-managed farms are also manifested in the fact that 5 to 9 year old children residing on female farms are about one standard deviation taller for their age and gender than similar children on other farms. The magnitudes of the coefficients on the interaction of livestock ownership and female farming suggest that policies to increase livestock holding of female farmers may have economically and socially important impacts on current and long-run child nutrition. Important policy implications emerge from the findings and they are summarized in the final chapter of the dissertation.