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Malnutrition is among the serious health problems affecting infants, children and women
of reproductive age in Tanzania. Various approaches have been adopted to address this
problem. Such approaches include; importation of food, food aid and medical treatment.
Despite these efforts, however, millions of Tanzanians particularly women and children
continue to suffer from one or more forms of malnutrition. Agriculture has been currently
taken as great measure to harness malnutrition among developing countries including
Tanzania, whereas recently new attention has been given to the role of agriculture in
nutrition and malnutrition. The study was conducted to determine an optimal farm
enterprise mix that uses available resources to maximize profit while ensuring adequate
supply of food to meet household’s macro-nutrient requirements. The study used cross
sectional data from 300 farming households from two villages of Chinoje and Mzula in
Chamwino District in Dodoma region of central Tanzania. A static linear programming
(LP) model was used to determine optimal farm enterprise mix and threshold dietary
requirements for smallholder farming households. The findings indicate that the optimal
enterprise mix that maximizes profit while meeting adequate macro-nutrient food needs
of the households entails a combination of 2.40 acres of millet, 0.75 acres of sunflower,
3.65 acres of groundnuts and at least 16 chickens. This nutrition sensitive optimal
resource combination enables the farming household to attain global optimal solution of
TZS 1 383 878. It could be concluded that with the current average farm production, most
of the farming households were unable to satisfy their household food needs from farm
production. In this regard, the study recommends for optimal combination of available
resources to meet minimal macro-nutrient requirements while generating an optimal level
of farm income. |
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