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The link between water, energy, and food has gotten more attention over the last years. The increased needs for water, energy and land resources, as well as the environmental degradation and, in some cases, scarce resources, have driven the search for strategies for sustainable development within the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus concept. This paper presents an approach to assess water and power distribution grids for food production, based on WEF nexus approach, in order to support decision-making and guide the sustainable development, sensitive to the nexus policies. The proposed optimization model seeks to identify the optimal solution including economic, environmental and social aspects that satisfy the stakeholders. The model is applied to a case study in the Sonora desert, Mexico. The results show that the proposed methodology is a suitable tool to evaluate multiple scenarios for the decision-making process. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.