Severe food insecurity afflicts at least 40% of people in Southern Africa, and rural communities are especially vulnerable. But a country such as Malawi, that has achieved high levels of food Âproduction, offers a blueprint for the region’s handling of this poverty-related scourge.
This week the Southern Africa Trust released its report Who Will Feed the Poor? The Future of Food Security for Southern Africa.
Skyrocketing food prices expose more people to poverty, and this should warn governments that they need to invest far more in the agricultural sector, the report says.
Seventy percent of people in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region depend on agricultural products, but Âgovernments in the region provide very little support to grow the Âfarming sector.
The Southern Africa Trust Âcommissioned the report because of the alarming state of poverty in the SADC region, said Jennifer Chiriga, the trust’s capacity-building coordinator.
”We felt we needed to mobilise the NGO sector to influence policy direction in terms of food security particularly because it affects vulnerable rural communities, 70% of whom depend on farming,” she said.
The trust’s aim is that the poor should have more say in shaping policies to end poverty.
Strategies include increasing regional policy dialogue among government, business and civil society, and providing grants to Âorganisations that engage in regional policy work geared to overcoming poverty.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) financial aid packages have directly contributed to the decline in food production, Chiriga said.
While global economic trends such as energy and oil prices cannot be discounted, severe conditions attached to financial aid have seen ”governments rolling back … their investment in the agricultural sector”, she said.
As a result, smallholding farmers – the mainstay of food production in rural communities – were Âalienated from the land because farming was no longer seen as a money-generating operation.
And with fewer resources committed to farming, small farmers’ capacity to produce sufficient food was severely curtailed and governments started to rely disproportionately on ”food imports”.
Chiriga said the smallholding farmers in the region are the Âprimary drivers of food production and have the potential to help reduce dependency on foreign food aid.
”We believe this [dependency] can be reversed by deliberate regional investments in the production of key imports such as grain, beef and milk Âproduction and the required infrastructure and irrigation,” the trust’s report argues.
”The poor transport infrastructure also affects smallholding farmers because they are unable to ferry their produce to the markets.
”Our view is that they should form themselves into associations so that they can pool their resources, coordinate their activities better and also leverage support from their governments,” Chiriga said.
Malawi, despite its meagre resources, stands out as a good model and its success could be used as a blueprint for the region’s economic revival, Chiriga said.
”It has achieved extremely high levels of food production and has become the region’s bread Âbasket.” Malawi’s agricultural sector boosted the country’s economic growth from 1% in 2003 to 8,5% in 2006.
”This is because President Bingu wa Mutharika’s government resisted some World Bank and IMF aid conditions and instead used its resources to develop the farming community,” Chiriga said.
”Nearly 90% of the population in Malawi is involved in subsistence farming and the agricultural sector contributes 60% of the country’s total income.”
What the region needs to do to avoid starvation