Tài liệu Food Security and Sustainable Development in Southern Africa doc

Food Security and Sustainable Development in Southern AfricaScott Drimie & Simphiwe Mini... In the search for a Global Deal at the World Summit onSustainable Development, which sought to

Food Security and Sustainable Development in Southern Africa

Scott Drimie & Simphiwe Mini

Integrated Rural and Regional Development Research Programme, Occasional Paper 6

Series Editor: Mike de Klerk (Executive Director: Integrated Rural and Regional Development, Human Sciences Research Council)

Published by the Human Sciences Research Council Publishers

Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

www.hsrc.ac.za/publishing

© Human Sciences Research Council

First published 2003

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form

or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

The Human Sciences Research Council publishes a number ofOccasional Papers These are designed to be quick, con-venient vehicles for making timely contributions to debates,disseminating interim research findings and otherwiseengaging with the broader research community Publications

in the various series are, in general, works-in-progress whichmay develop into journal articles, chapters in books or otherfinal products Authors invite comments and suggestions fromreaders

About the Authors

Scott Drimie is a senior research specialist in the IntegratedRural and Regional Development Research Programme of theHuman Sciences Research Council (HSRC) He holds a PhDfrom Cambridge University His doctoral thesis focused on theSouth African land policy as implemented in the period 1994

to 1999 Since joining the HSRC, he has been involved inresearch around integrated rural development including landreform, agricultural development, micro-finance and emer-gency relief He has also worked for the southern AfricanRegional Poverty Network (SARPN) and travelled widelyacross the Southern African Development Community (SADC)region He organised a major conference on land reform andpoverty alleviation as part of his work for SARPN

Simphiwe Mini is also a senior research specialist in theHSRC’s Integrated Rural and Regional Development ResearchProgramme He holds a PhD in geography and environmentalscience from the University of Fort Hare Prior to joining theHSRC, he worked at the University of Fort Hare as Professor ofGeography and Environmental Sciences where he was respon-sible for developing and co-coordinating postgraduate andundergraduate research programmes and for co-coordinatingresearch programmes for the faculties of science andagriculture Dr Mini has extensive experience in social andenvironmental science research, sustainable rural developmentand rural economy, agrarian reform, and in research design andmethodology

Comments and suggestions on this paper can be emailed toSEDrimie@hsrc.ac.za or Smini@hsrc.ac.za

In the search for a Global Deal at the World Summit onSustainable Development, which sought to address globaleconomic relationships between the North and the South, acrucial area of debate was food security Despite impressivedevelopments around food growth in recent decades, resulting

in enough food to meet the basic needs of every person in theworld, not everyone is food-secure, as exemplified by theacute food shortages in the southern African region during

2002 and 2003 There are many causes of food insecurity,among them macro and micro issues, the roots of which areessentially internal or indirectly caused by relationships withother countries Examples are political instability, poor economic governance, poverty and a lack of sustainablehousehold income The issue of HIV/AIDS has added anothercritical dimension to the search for food security Strategies forenhancing income diversification and the income-generatingcapacity of vulnerable groups in urban and rural areas should

be a major priority for both the developing and developedworld, coupled with genuine commitment to internationaltrade reforms

Food Security and Sustainable Development in Southern Africa

Introduction

The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in August 2002 brought together globalleaders from government, civil society and business to reviewthe implementation of Agenda 21, launched at the UnitedNations Conference on Environment and Development(UNCED) held in Rio in 1992 The 2002 summit focused onproblems associated with increasing levels of poverty andglobal inequality, highlighted the need to integrate the threepillars of sustainable development (economic, social andenvironmental) and to renew commitment to the Rio Prin-ciples It was also intended to facilitate agreement on actionsneeded for the further implementation of Agenda 21, and to

‘find solutions to the current crises facing humanity today:poverty, conflict, economic instability, the negative effects ofglobalisation, the degradation of environmental resources andemerging pandemics such as HIV/AIDS’ (Naidoo, 2002)

It has been widely acknowledged that there has beenlimited success since the Rio conference in integrating thesocial, economic and environmental pillars of sustainabledevelopment and in creating a coherent and integrated

global-local governance framework to underpin them In 2000,eight years after UNCED, world leaders met at the UnitedNations Millennium Summit and agreed upon the MillenniumDeclaration, committing themselves to achieving a broadrange of time-bound, international development objectivesbased on sustainable development principles This was a stepfurther towards international recognition that practical andtime-bound measures are needed to advance sustainabledevelopment and to target some of the greatest challenges tohumanity, namely, poverty and global inequality In grapplingwith this challenge, the South African government workedtowards a Global Deal for the WSSD which was intended toconstitute agreement, at the highest level, on actions needed

to combat the growing challenges facing sustainable ment, with a poverty eradication focus, as envisaged in theMillennium Declaration

develop-The South African government believed that a globalresponse to these critical areas was needed as a basis forlaunching a concrete and holistic global initiative for theimplementation of Agenda 21 and sustainable development.The government thus developed a list of 22 priority areas forinternational negotiations front-loaded by six core areas thatfocused on basic needs and furthered sustainable develop-ment through efficient use of resources The six sectors werewater, energy, food security, health, education and tech-nology In terms of food security, the immediate focus was,firstly, on the need to recognise that immediate action wasnecessary to reverse the current maldistribution of foodthroughout the world that denies people access and secondly,

on market access for agricultural products, particularly fordeveloping countries

Food security therefore lay at the heart of South Africa’sconceptualisation of sustainable development and povertyreduction, as one of six core areas that required attention atthe WSSD However, the issue of food security often becomessubmerged within the intractable challenges facing development, as it raises issues that are linked to a host ofdevelopment concepts, particularly the fight against poverty

This had particular resonance during the WSSD inJohannesburg as the United Nations’ World Food Programme(WFP) and Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)announced in June 2002, barely weeks before the Summit, that12.8 million people in southern Africa were on the brink ofstarvation

This paper attempts to unravel some of the difficult debatesaround food security It provides an overview of the status quo

in thinking on food security at the time of the WSSD, outlinesthe main issues, and draws a broad set of policy implicationsfrom the discussion

A brief overview of food security

The concept of food security helps to foster an integratedapproach to food and nutrition as it places stress on theavoidance of under-nutrition or starvation as the fundamentalfood policy goal According to Frank Ellis (1992: 310), itimplies putting in place a set of instruments and mechanismsthat seek:

• To overcome existing long-term nutritional deprivation invulnerable groups of the population; and

• To avert short-term nutritional deprivation resulting fromadverse natural events or sudden changes in the capacity

of people to acquire enough food

These issues were accepted by the 1996 World Food Summit

in Rome in recognition of the unacceptable dimensions ofproblems of hunger and malnutrition – issues seen asprimarily associated with poverty and intensified by inter-action with conflict and other sources of political instability.Reflecting the importance of the issue of food security, theconcept has evolved, developed, multiplied and diversified inrecent years as a result of the diverse nature of the problem(ODI, 1997)

In the 1970s, the concept was seen mainly as a ‘foodproblem’, particularly of ensuring production of adequate foodsupplies and maximising stability in their flow This view led

to a focus on measures to reduce price variability and financethe additional costs of exceptional imports at an internationallevel, and on self-sufficiency strategies at a national level In

1983, the FAO expanded the concept to include a third aspect,namely, securing access to available supplies for vulnerablepeople, thus ensuring that attention was balanced between thedemand and supply sides of the food security equation Thisconcept, powerfully influenced by the work of economist andNobel Laureate Amartya Sen, resulted in the definition mostwidely accepted and used as capturing the spirit of foodsecurity:

[Food security] is access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life Its essential elements are the availability

of food and the ability to acquire it Food insecurity, in turn, is the lack of access to enough food (World Bank, 1986: 1).

This definition was further elaborated at the 1997 World FoodSummit as:

[Food] security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels [is achieved] when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (ODI, 1997)

It has therefore been recognised at a global level, that theworld food problem is not synonymous with the problems ofworld hunger and food insecurity Achieving longer-term foodsecurity is inextricably linked to overcoming other globalcrises, such as population growth, unemployment, debt,energy consumption, environmental and political security – allproblems with significant national and local components thatimpact negatively on one another (ODI, 1997) Direct causes

of food insecurity include poverty, ill health, exclusion,conflict and natural disasters

Conceptualising food insecurity: the work of Sen

It has been largely through the influence of Sen that theconcept of food security has moved beyond debates around

‘national food availability’ to the ‘food entitlements of viduals and groups’ In other words, people starve because of

indi-a food entitlement findi-ailure rindi-ather thindi-an becindi-ause of indi-a foodavailability failure Sen elaborated a series of proposals thatadvanced traditional welfare economics, including the incorp-oration of individual entitlements, functioning, opportunities,capabilities, freedoms and rights into the conceptual found-ations and technical apparatus of economics and social choice Sen’s ‘entitlements approach’ provides a framework foranalysing the relationship between rights, interpersonal

obligations and individual entitlement to things (ODI, 2001) A

person’s entitlement is a way of characterising an overallcommand over things that takes note of all relevant rights andobligations This entitlement is the totality of things a personcan have by virtue of rights, the latter being characterised asrelationships that hold between distinct agents (betweenpersons, between the state and a person) Sen hypothesisedthat, ‘[m]ost cases of starvation and famines across the worldarise not from people being deprived of things to which theyare entitled, but from people not being entitled, in theprevailing legal system of institutional rights, to adequatemeans of survival’ (1981, 1984 cited in ODI, 2001)

Sen distinguished four different types of entitlements thatindividuals, or households may possess or acquire in a marketeconomy (cited in Ellis, 1992: 307):

• Trade-based entitlement: ownership of goods or resources

obtained by trading something a person or householdowns with another party;

• Production-based entitlement: ownership of output

pro-duced using personal or household resources, or usingresources willingly hired by others;

• Own-labour entitlement: ownership of personal labour

power, thus enabling the person or household to obtain

trade or production-based entitlement in exchange fortheir own labour power; and

• Inheritance or transfer entitlement: ownership of goods or

resources bequeathed or freely given to the person orhousehold

Sen’s empirical work suggests that in many famines, in whichmillions of people have died, there is a range of variables,other than simple agricultural productivity and aggregate foodsupply, that can undermine a person’s entitlement to food; andthat there is a possibility of an asymmetry in the incidence ofstarvation deaths among different population groups Inessence, certain people in specific population groups starvenot only because of overall food shortages but also becausethey are unable to trade their labour power or skills Thereforestarvation occurs as a consequence of shifts in entitlementsresulting from exercising rights that are legitimate in legalterms These findings underpin the notion that insecure foodentitlements may not arise from market failure whereby aperson starves because of an inability to acquire sufficientfood through production or exchange

Sen, therefore, made the fundamental point that ment objectives cannot be met by macro-level interventionsalone, as individual members of a nation have to be allowedgreater freedom to explore their full potential and worth This

develop-is a matter of improving human capability, which comes withbetter governance, less corruption and better democraticsystems Individuals should, therefore, have the opportunity toparticipate in economic activity; and the economy must allowthem to access resources to develop their own welfare andthat of their families

These theoretical underpinnings have influenced thinkingaround famines and, indeed, the approach of such organ-isations as the FAO, the WFP and other UN agencies As theOverseas Development Institute (ODI) has asserted, theentitlements approach helped to shift the focus of inter-national attention away from statistics describing per capitacalories and food supplies, towards statistics describing the

differential ability of individuals, groups and classes tocommand food in practice (2001) As a result, currentapproaches to food security place an increased emphasis onidentifying the precise causes of the food vulnerability ofpopulation groups.1 This philosophy is reflected in the United

Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human

Develop-ment Report (2000), which focuses on the inter-relationshipsbetween human development and human rights, calling for aframework for trade and investment that respects, protects andpromotes human rights and encourages a greater commitment

to human rights priorities in developing countries

The outlook of global food insecurity

In 1996, the World Food Summit strengthened internationalresolve to achieve global food security and intensify ongoingefforts to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediateview to reducing the number of undernourished people tohalf their present level by no later than 2015 (DFID, 2002) Atthe Millennium Summit in 2000, 191 countries redefined thistarget into a Millennium Declaration Goal, which set out to

‘halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whosuffer from hunger’ Over the past three decades, world foodproduction has grown faster than population growth Theremarkable growth in food availability achieved in developingcountries, more than halved the proportion of undernourishedfrom 37 to 17 per cent in 1997 to 1999 If available food could

be distributed evenly, each person would be assured of 2 700calories a day

However, despite these international commitments toresolving food insecurity and the real achievements in globalfood security, the gap between the aspiration of eradicatinghunger and the continuing reality of approximately 800million, or more, undernourished people is stark On a globalscale, progress is being made in reducing the absolute number

of hungry people in the world, but this is not happening fastenough to achieve the Millennium Declaration Goal World

food is neither evenly distributed, nor fully consumed, among,

or within, countries The FAO report on the State of Food

Insecurity in the World (1999b) indicated that the number ofundernourished people had been reduced to 790 million, that

is, 40 million less than the number estimated at the WorldFood Summit in 1996 Whilst the total number of chronicallyundernourished people in the developing world has fallen byapproximately 40 million in the last decade, the average rate

of decline has continued to be very slow, reaching six million

a year, compared with eight million reported in 1996 (FAO,1996) Consequently, the annual reduction required to reachthe target by 2015 has grown from 20 to 22 million people peryear Hence the gap between realised reductions andreductions needed is widening At the present rate it wouldtake 60 years to reach the estimated target

During the period 1990 to 1996, a new flash point of hungerand food insecurity has emerged In sub-Saharan Africa, thenumber of undernourished people doubled between 1969 and

1992 to 215 million people, and the proportion of thepopulation who were undernourished rose from 38 to 43 percent (FAO, 2001) Thus, while remarkable progress has beenmade in some developing countries in reducing chronichunger and abject poverty, particularly in east and south Asia,the situation of sub-Saharan Africa continued to deterioratethrough the 1990s (FAO, 1999a) The situation in this region issimilar to that of Asia in the early 1960s, with widespreadpoverty and malnutrition, large national food deficits andincreasingly higher dependence on food imports and otherconcessionary aid However, the problem of food insecurityvaries in severity across the African continent Although WestAfrica has the largest population of any sub-region, it has thelowest number of undernourished people East Africa hasmore than twice as many undernourished people (FAO, 2001).The numbers in central and southern Africa are also propor-tionately larger, although both have smaller total populations

The southern African food crisis

Southern Africa’s food security has also deteriorated with thenumber of food-insecure people in this region doublingduring the 1980s from about 22 million people in 1979/81 to

39 million in 1990/92 The severe food shortages and hungerthat have recently struck countries in the southern AfricanDevelopment Community (SADC) region, particularly inMalawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozam-bique, have been described as the ‘worst food crisis in adecade’ (WFP/FAO, 2002) The region has suffered from alethal mix of food shortages, lack of access to basic socialservices and an alarmingly high prevalence of HIV/AIDS – allcontributing to the growing numbers of vulnerable people inrural and urban southern Africa According to several reportsfrom WFP/FAO missions undertaken in the SADC region in

2002, 14 million people were living on the brink of starvationand faced serious food shortages until the region’s next mainharvest in April 2003 (WFP/FAO, 2002) This assessment offood shortages revealed a situation close to disaster, asindicated in Table 1 below:

Table 1: Food requirements in the SADC region: 2002

need of food aid

Metric tonnes cereal food aid up to March 2003

Cereal food aid

as percentage

of national requirement

The analysis of the SADC’s regional food situation showed thatfor the 2001/02 season, the region had a cereal deficit of over3.22 million tons which included a maize deficit (the staplecrop) of 1.10 million tons

Table 2: Cereal production and utilisation (all figures in ’000 metric tons

Lesotho Malawi Swaziland Mozambique Zambia Zimbabwe Total

Domestic 73.8 1 721 77.2 1 933 739 838 5 382.0 availability

Total 412.2 2 206 118.2 2 575 1 416 2 707 9 434.4 utilisation

Import 338.4 485 110.9 642 677 1 869 4 122.3 required

Estimated 191.4 277 95.7 592 352 312 1 820.1 commercial

in the 2001/02 season However, according to the FAO/WFP,food output and availability in southern Africa in 2002/3 hasbeen affected by a number of factors as outlined below

Poor rainfallErratic rainfalls were identified as the major cause

of the reduced production of cereals in the region In contrast

to the previous drought of 1992, when a complete lack ofrainfall devastated crop production as well as livestock, rains

in parts of the region were near normal and livestock herdshad not been unduly affected However dry spells extendedacross large sections of the SADC region Regional variations

in rainfall were reflected most clearly in Zambia, Lesotho,

Malawi and Mozambique where production levels in someparts of these countries were below normal and in some partscrops failed completely

Despite the important link to drought, the food shortages of2002/03 differed markedly from the food shortages of 1992,which were due entirely to drought

Economic problems and inflation Problems such as economic performance, inconsistent food policies, successiveyears of conflict, chronic malnutrition and the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the world, increased the vulnerability

macro-of the region Purchasing power had fallen with the result thatcertain households faced an acute food shortage, taking onemeal a day, if any In Mozambique, a year of flood followed

by a year of drought has severely impacted on food security

In Zimbabwe, natural disasters, including drought andflooding, were compounded by political upheaval and thedisruption of commercial farming through the fast-track landredistribution programme The area of maize planted by large-scale commercial farmers had declined to an estimated 60 percent lower level than in 1999 to 2000

Mismanagement and poor governance Issues surroundingmismanagement and bad governance lie at the heart ofinappropriate food-security strategies at the national level.Disaster mitigation strategies in particular, are key in thisregard SADC countries should, for example, maintainpermanent budgets to help alleviate the effects of sudden,unexpected disasters such as droughts or floods However,many SADC governments failed to develop their capacitiesand preferred to respond to crises (Sunday Independent, 19May 2002) This was epitomised by some countries waiting fordroughts before requesting help from the internationalcommunity, which was often slow in responding and some-times responded inappropriately Zimbabwe and Malawi wereprime examples of this problem

Corruption Corruption was another major cause of the foodcrisis The Malawian government, for example, sold itsstrategic grain reserve of 110 000 tons in 2001 at the behest ofthe International Monetary Fund in order to balance itspayments when there were already signs of food insecurity As

a result, Malawi needed US$21,6 million to cover its 600 ton maize deficit barely a year later Corruption charges werelevelled at some of Malawi’s elite for buying this reserve andre-selling it in the country at a 500 per cent profit (SundayIndependent, 19 May 2002)

000-HIV/AIDSAnother serious cause of the food crisis in southernAfrica was discussed at a consultation meeting organised byUNAIDS and the Regional Inter-Agency Co-ordination SupportOffice (RIACSO) in November 2002 The meeting, attended byover 70 participants from UN agencies and civil societyorganisations, concluded that the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS, especially in the worst-affected areas, such as southernAfrica, was complicating the task of fighting hunger andstrengthening the livelihoods of the poor The pandemic wascreating large new vulnerable groups and was rapidly erodingfood and livelihood security The UN had thus come to realisethat although all famines have long-term roots in unevendevelopment, the fundamental difference in the 2002/3 crisiswas the influence of HIV/AIDS-related morbidity and mor-tality, which both worsened and was exacerbated by the foodcrisis, creating a dual tragedy

Commercial and subsistence agriculture are particularlysusceptible to the pandemic and are facing a severe social andeconomic crisis in some locations due to its impact.Agriculture is one of the most important sectors in manydeveloping countries, providing a living or survival mec-hanism for up to 80 percent of a country’s population Theimpact of HIV/AIDS is exacerbating the challenges alreadyfacing the sector, including unfavourable international terms oftrade, mounting population pressure on land, and environ-mental degradation The major impact of AIDS on agriculture