Several countries in Central Africa face challenges of low food production and high incidences of poverty, particularly in rural areas. Several programs initiated in the region to increase food production and commercialization among smallholder farmers have had limited success. Over 80% of the farm households grow bananas and legumes as staple crops. We evaluate the impact of commercialization of these crops on‐farm income and the dietary diversity of rural households in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We employ three methods: propensity score matching, endogenous switching regression, and IPTW on cross‐sectional data. We find that commercialization has a robust and positive significant effect on dietary diversity and farm income, even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across the households. In particular, commercialization increases household incomes by 67% and dietary diversity by 11%. We find strong evidence of the impact of commercialization on incomes but little evidence of dietary diversity of rural households. Wider policy recommendations to raise the capacity of smallholders to produce for the market and improve their livelihoods are discussed. [EconLit citations: Q13, Q12, Q11]

中文翻译：

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粮食作物商品化和家庭生计：来自中非农村地区的证据

中部非洲的几个国家面临粮食产量低和贫困率高的挑战，特别是在农村地区。在该地区发起的提高小农户粮食生产和商品化的若干计划取得的成功有限。超过80％的农户以香蕉和豆类为主食。我们评估了这些作物的商业化对卢旺达和刚果民主共和国农民收入和农村家庭饮食多样性的影响。我们采用三种方法：倾向得分匹配，内生转换回归和IPTW横截面数据。我们发现，即使在控制了家庭中未观察到的异质性之后，商品化对饮食多样性和农场收入也具有强大而积极的显着影响。尤其是，商业化使家庭收入增加了67％，饮食多样性增加了11％。我们发现有强有力的证据表明商品化对收入的影响，但很少有证据表明农村家庭的饮食多样化。讨论了旨在提高小农户生产市场能力和改善其生计的更广泛的政策建议。[EconLit引用：问题13，问题12，问题11]