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land, lowland fields are almost invariably planted to rice. Although returns to land arehigher for upland rice than for local maize, the high labor requirement for upland rice,especially for weeding, lowers the returns for labor. Both labor and land productivityare higher for hybrid maize than for upland rice. The higher productivity of hybridmaize has induced a rapid expansion of its area.Upland rice is usually the crop planted in the first one or two years after slashand-burnagriculture, followed by maize and cassava when the soil becomes less fertile.While wet rice from lowland fields becomes the main source of rice supply,farmers usually maintain supplementary upland rice on swidden fields, mostly stickyrice, to satisfy household needs. In the more favorable upland environment with goodmarket access and where farmers have sufficient access to lowland rice cultivation,there is an increasing trend toward substitution of hybrid or improved open-pollinatedvariety maize for upland rice. Most of the hybrid maize output is used in thehousehold as feed for domestic animals and a small portion is sold to markets.Rice is the main food crop of the uplands. Although production of maize, especiallyimproved maize, is mainly used for domestic animals, some ethnic minoritiesstill depend on maize as their main diet. Other staples such as cassava, sweet potato,and canna (Canna edulis, a root crop) are consumed when rice and maize are in shortsupply. Most of the households in the study areas reported that they were unable tomeet the family food requirement from their own production of rice and maize. Onaverage, 88% of rice and maize consumption is from own production. This proportionof subsistence food production is almost equal among the two groups of householdsin the poor and good market access areas.The frequencies of reported food shortage are presented in Figure 4. On average,the extent of food shortage is greater in areas with poor access to markets (2.4mo) than in areas with good market access (2.1 mo). The chi-square test for the differencein the two distributions gave a value of 37.17 (9 degrees of freedom), which isstatistically significant at 1%. It is expected that households in areas with good marketaccess having more diversified sources of income would depend more on thePercentage of households3530Poor market accessGood market access25201510500 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8Number of months of food shortage9Fig. 4. Distribution of households reporting foodshortage by number of months of food shortagein 1997-98.382 Khiem et al