ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that both in Hausaland and in Tamil Nadu the commercialisation process has given rise to significant transfers of grain, money and power from rural to urban areas and explores the relationships between commercialisation and nutrition levels in peasant households. The nature of commercialisation and the emergence of marketing systems have crucial significance for economic and social change. The contemporary commercialisation of grain is part of a wider process of appropriation of surplus in the form of products. Classically the role of merchants, who are frequently urban-based, in the process of commercialisation has been recognised to be profoundly contradictory. The transaction between rural producer and urban trader constitutes a social relationship, a relation of exchange. The chapter shows that in sub-Saharan Africa land, labour and grain are not as highly commercialised as in South Asia. In South Asia, massive inequalities in income and assets are reflected in per caput food intakes.
