Malnutrition is recognized as a major issue among low-income households in
developing countries with long-term implications for economic development. Recently, crop
diversification has been recognized as a strategy to improve nutrition and health, and as a risk
coping strategy used by farmers in the face of climate change. However, there is no systematic
empirical evidence on the role played by crop diversification in improving human health. We use
the Tanzania National Panel Survey to investigate the effects of crop diversification on child
health. We use fixed effects panel estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity, and
perform several robustness checks including placebo tests to test the validity of our findings. We
find a positive and significant effect of crop diversification on long-term child nutritional status,
in particular for very young children and children living in households with limited market
access.