Malnutrition and the development of rural households in the Agreste of Paraiba state, North‐east Brazil

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Abstract
The rural socio‐economic environment producing childhood malnutrition is considered. Recent work posits a relationship between landholding and the prevalence of malnutrition. This question is re‐phrased here by introducing household developmental cycles into the argument, supported by new data. In the context of the class of land‐ and employment‐poor rural households in the North‐east, these cycles operate to produce a high‐risk phase of development through which all households have to pass as they mature. The prevalence of malnutrition is then explained by specific household characteristics which in turn dictate the effectiveness of the subsistence strategies employed, where income is collected together from agriculture and/or wage labour. A model of household development linked into the landholding structure reveals that using area farmed alone provides an insufficient explanation, and indeed understates the severity of the problem.