Rapid economic growth has failed to significantly improve poverty and nutrition outcomes in Tanzania.
This raises concerns over a decoupling of growth, poverty, and nutrition. We link recent production trends
to household incomes using a regionalized, dynamic computable general equilibrium and microsimulation
model. Results indicate that the structure of economic growth—not the level—is currently constraining
the rate of poverty reduction in Tanzania. Most importantly, agricultural growth trends have been driven
by larger-scale farmers and by crops grown in only a few regions of the country. The slow expansion of
food crops and livestock also explains the weak relationship between agricultural growth and nutrition
outcomes. Additional model simulations find that accelerating agricultural growth, particularly in maize,
greatly strengthens the growth–poverty relationship and enhances households’ caloric availability. We
conclude that low productivity, market constraints (including downstream agroprocessing), and barriers to
import substitution for major food crops are among the more binding constraints to reducing poverty and
improving nutrition in Tanzania.