Mercedes Sayagues
Zimbabwe is waking up with a shock to a hidden cost of the Aids pandemic: declining food production. Too many adults are sick or dead. Their surviving relatives are too old or too young or too busy nursing the sick to farm.
This week, the Commercial Farmer’s Union put figures to the decline of Zimbabwe’s agricultural food output: maize by 61%, cotton by 47% and vegetables by 49%.
Why? Because of the loss of workers and workdays due to HIV/Aids – even allowing for heavy rains in the last rainy season and price controls that discouraged planting cash crops.
Kerry Kay, the Aids co-ordinator at the Commercial Farmer’s Union, castigated the government for spending Z$70-million a month on the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and only Z$1-million a month on Aids prevention – 10 years into the pandemic.
African peasant agriculture will never be the same after Aids. But it is taking too long for ministries of agriculture, donors and NGOs to adapt to the grim reality.
Aids is usually seen in terms of public health costs, loss of skilled labour and loss of workdays in industry. But its effects on smallholder agriculture, although less obvious, are equally severe.
“Global and regional Aids conferences held since the mid-1980s rarely focus on the impact of the epidemic on rural livelihoods,” concluded a conference on Aids and African smallholder agriculture held in Harare last year.
Declining life expectancy makes headlines. Declining food security among rural people does not – not until it has an impact on total food production.
In Zimbabwe, more than half of the staple maize and of the export crops of cotton and tobacco are grown by smallholders.
So is Uganda’s main export, coffee. The coffee-growing areas near Lake Victoria have the highest HIV/Aids prevalence, hence fewer adults. Around Masaka and Rakai districts the unkempt plantations tell the story.
In northern Uganda, millet and sorghum are left overgrown because labour goes into caring for the sick. Among pastoralists in the east, adults are dying before they can transmit skills in herd care.
Zimbabwe’s irrigated maize and tobacco do not suffer as much. But Aids widows in the communal areas are growing less food because they lack money to hire tractors, ploughs and casual labour. Their savings, tools and animals paid for medical and burial expenses for Aids-stricken husbands.
“From the time one adult family member is bedridden, Aids compromises the nutrition and food security of the whole family,” says Godfrey Ssewankambo, deputy director of Uganda’s Women’s Effort for Orphans.
The cycle goes like this: a man is taken ill. While nursing him, the wife can’t weed the maize and cotton fields, mulch and pare the banana trees, dry the coffee or harvest the rice. This means less food crops and less income from cash crops. Trips to town for medical treatment, hospital fees and medicines consume savings. Traditional healers are paid with livestock.
The man dies. Farm tools, sometimes cattle, are sold to pay burial expenses. Mourning practices forbid farming for several days. Precious time for farm chores is lost.
In the next season, unable to hire casual labour, the family plants a smaller area. Without pesticides, weeds and bugs multiply. Children leave school to weed and harvest.
Again yields are lower. With little home- grown food and without cash to buy fish or meat, family nutrition and health suffer.
If the mother becomes ill with Aids, the cycle of asset and labour loss is repeated. Families withdraw into subsistence farming. Overall production of cash crops drops.
`The bottom line is that Aids causes an acute shortage of labour and tremendous dependency on households headed by females and the elderly,” says Gary Howe, director for Africa at the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
Ministries of agriculture, donors and NGOs are not reaching their new clientele – women and youth. They need stronger hoes and lighter ploughs; farming techniques that require less labour, like zero tillage; and instead of expensive pesticides, natural pest control.
On the political side, a shift from customary land tenure to freehold could lead to distress land sales when the man falls sick. Says Paul Richards, from Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands: “If land tenure reform is pursued aggressively in rural regions at high risk of HIV/Aids, survivors may join the swelling ranks of a landless class, a phenomenon hitherto unknown in Africa.”
A new study by the United Nations on the responses of sub-Saharan rural households and communities finds some coping strategies, like income diversification, share-cropping and labour-saving technology such as mixing crops, are beneficial.
Also, communities are evolving ingenious responses, such as sharing farm chores, house repairs and child care, and changing cultural practices like expensive funerals.
But, warns the study, “community resources are stretched to breaking point”.
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