Does agricultural commercialization improve women’s diets?: Evidence from Cameroon

• Agricultural commercialization improves women’s diets. • Agricultural commercialization improves incomes and the number of crops grown. • Women in commercial households are likely to consume more nuts and seeds, and vegetables. • Promoting commercialization is important but not at the expense of diversified agriculture. • Promoting commercialization is important for women and Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3). Agricultural commercialization is widely recognized as an important means towards improving welfare, especially diets and nutrition of households. However, there is limited evidence on how commercialization affects the diets of individual household members, especially women, despite evidence of gender disparities in intra-household resource allocation and consumption. In this paper, I analyze how commercialization affects women’s diets by using data from 440 households and 450 women from the West region of Cameroon. I employ control function methods to address potential endogeneity issues. The results show that commercialization is positively associated with women’s diets. The findings are robust across different estimation strategies. The results further show that commercialization operates through the number of crops cultivated and income pathways. These findings underscore the importance of commercialization policies not only for agricultural transformation but also for improving women’s diets. Policy actions that drive commercialization should thus be promoted.