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Food Security and the African situationFood security is considered a human right. Yet, in Africa south of the Sahara, food insecurity is more prevalent than ever, with a more volatile environment, more people undernourished and heavier dependency on food aid. However, the root cause is just as much persistent poverty as poor productivity.
The major challenge to food security in Africa is the underdeveloped and underperforming agricultural sector, with its low fertility soils and minimal use of external farm inputs, as well as other obstacles, including reduced access to markets and subsidized food production in the North. At the start of the 21st century, The Hunger Task Force states, sub-Saharan Africa is witnessing the largest and fastest increase in food insecurity worldwide, with undernourishment rates over 40% – the highest in the world.
A matter of definition – and politics The World Food Summit in Rome 1996 defined food security as a state where all people, at all times, have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Within the definition, there is a distinction between chronic and acute food insecurity, the former occurring when people are unable to access sufficient, safe, and nutritious food over long periods; the latter when the lack of access to adequate food is more short-term, usually caused by shocks such as drought or war – both frequent occurrences in Africa.
Critics of the food policy of the UN system and the main donor community, argue that food security is very much a matter of politics and that the problem is not shortage of food as such – there is basically enough food in the world – but a question of political will for fair distribution regardless of the consumer’s ability to pay.
Food security consists of three aspects: food availability, food access and food adequacy. The first pertains to the supply of food, the second the demand for food (including infrastructure), and the last with the fact that food must be sufficient in quality as well as quantity. Food insecurity is no longer simply seen as the failure to produce sufficient food at the national level, but as a failure of livelihoods to guarantee access to sufficient food at the household level – seen in complex interlinkages between the individual, the household, the community, the nation and the international community.
At a major conference on African food and nutrition security in Kampala, Uganda, hosted by the International Food Research Institute (IFPRI) in 2004, the Ugandan president, Yoweri K. Museveni, as well as his Nigerian counterpart, Olusegun Obasanjo, raised the matter of food security as a political – and global – question. “You cannot talk about total food security for Africa without talking about the need to gain access to rich western countries’ agricultural markets,” Museveni explained. Obasanjo raised the issue of subsidies in the North: “In the OECD the subsidies stand at about one billion US dollars per day. We are all familiar with the cliché about Africans living on less than one US dollar per day. Yet a cow in Europe is subsidized at over two US dollars per day.”
If Africans and sub-Saharan peasants fare poorly, African women are even worse off, in terms of access to education and credits, work burdens and the right to land ownership. At the same conference, a clear point was made – that improved land ownership for women could change the face of Africa and speed up efforts to achieve food and nutrition security. That is also the argument presented in the IFPRI report “Increasing the Effective Participation of Women in Food and Nutrition Security in Africa”, a reminder that women play a paramount role in family food security in all cultures. In Africa, over 70% of women are estimated to be involved in agricultural activities, but have severely restricted rights to land.
Distressing development – linked to poverty According to estimates by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), almost 200 million Africans were undernourished at the dawn of the millennium, compared to 133 million 20 years earlier. The rate of increase in undernourishment in Africa vastly exceeds that of other regions of the South. There are regional differences, with sub-Saharan Africa hardest hit. Here, about 33 % of the population is undernourished, compared to about 6 % in North Africa and 15 % in Asia, according to the FAO. And more than 60 % of the undernourished in sub-Saharan Africa are in Eastern Africa.
The World Food Summit set targets for the reduction of hunger, which have largely been missed, particularly in Africa. Also, the Millennium Development Goal on hunger and poverty is likely to fail in Africa. A projected aggregate demand growth for food of 2.8 % per year up to 2015 is likely to exceed projected production growth of 2.6 % per year over the same period, implying that major food imports are needed in the absence of significant productivity growth. The combination of low agricultural productivity and an adverse environment have made Africa the prime recipient of food aid. At the same time, Africa is forced to divert scarce resources to importing food.
The Rome Declaration of 1996 made the connection between food insecurity and poverty clear, as well as the impact of the political environment: “Poverty is a major cause of food insecurity and sustainable progress in poverty eradication is critical to improve access to food. Conflict, terrorism, corruption and environmental degradation also contribute significantly to food insecurity.” The high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa has greatly added to the problem. Today, there is also more awareness regarding the effect of climatic changes, which are now of a magnitude that defeats the previously adequate indigenous practices of small-scale farmers.
“The root cause of food insecurity in developing countries,” argues Angela Mwaniki of Cornell University, “is the inability of people to gain access to food due to poverty”. When a large proportion of the population in Africa south of the Sahara lives in poverty, they also live with food insecurity. Despite increased agricultural output over the last decades, population increase has been higher – and so poverty grows. Hence, food security in Africa has worsened since the early 1970s, and the malnourished population has remained at about one-third in sub-Saharan Africa. Smallholder farmers constitute half the poor, and produce over 90% of the continent’s food supply. Therefore, “Because over 70 percent of the poor live in rural areas, where also the largest proportion of the food insecure live, it is evident that we cannot significantly and sustainably reduce food insecurity without transforming the living conditions in these areas”.
Even a great majority of small-scale food producers purchase food. For the rural poor, food security therefore depends as much on employment and income as the production of food.
Still, an overall increase in food production – through improved agricultural productivity – is paramount in reducing food insecurity in Africa. Proponents of an African Green Revolution argue in favor of the application of biotechnology – including genetic engineering. There are objections to aspects of biotechnology, and particularly to genetic modification – which critics claim has not been proven to outweigh potential risks to the environment, and human and animal health. Another aspect is the danger for African countries and farmers of becoming increasingly dependent on multinational, commercial interests.
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