Tanzanian Food Surplus and Poverty

 Lack of political will to invest in agriculture in Africa has led to a vicious cycle that could keep costing the continent billions of dollars annually. The president of the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Mr Kanayo Nwanze, says Africa spends $35 billion a year to import food, money that could have been used to create jobs in agriculture. While Africa has a quarter of the world's arable land, it only generates 10 per cent of global agricultural output. "If even a portion of the money used for food imports was spent on creating jobs in rural areas, not only would the world's largest youth population see a viable future on the continent, but Africa would be able to feed itself," Mr Nwanze adds. 

Employing directly and indirectly about 65.5 per cent of Tanzanians, contributing 29 per cent to GDP and comprising 30 per cent of exports and 65 per cent of inputs to the industrial sector, agriculture is the veritable backbone of the Tanzanian economy. But one could be forgiven for thinking that adequate public investment is being poured into the sector to add value to the livelihoods of at least 35 million Tanzanians. Budgetary allocations in the agriculture sector are inadequate and have been the cause of its slow growth, making higher earnings for the rural population a far-fetched dream.

Poor investment in agriculture has made Tanzania in particular and Africa in general a net food importer, wasting the limited financial resources that could have been invested in the sector and create millions of jobs.

Tanzania's food import situation is worrying. Available statistics show that the country spent Sh885.8 billion ($421.8 million) on food and foodstuff imports in the 12 months between May 2015 and May 2016, according to the Bank of Tanzania. This is equivalent to 88.5 per cent of the total budget for the agriculture sector in 2015/16.

Tanzania spends significant resources on food imports despite the fact that the country is considered food self-sufficient with food production exceeding 100 per cent of demand "in years of adequate rainfall". Tanzania had a food surplus of 2.6 million tonnes following more than adequate rains and harvests during the 2013/14 and 2014/15 farming seasons. The country harvested about 15.5 million tonnes of food in 2014/15 (to be consumed in the 2015/16 financial year). Among these, 8.9 million tonnes were grain and 6.6 million tonnes non-cereal harvests. The total food demand in 2015/16 was 12.9 million tonnes (8.2 million cereal and 4.8 non cereal) Food supply analysis shows that Tanzania is food sufficient by 120 per cent, down from 125 per cent in 2014/15,

Among the 25 Mainland regions, however, only nine regions had food surplus, six were food sufficient and six had food shortages in the period under review. Despite good harvests, at least 69 district face serious food shortages.

Experts say famine persists in Tanzania due to extreme poverty as well as poor infrastructure and inadequate distribution channels.

Feeding Ourselves

Vegetables rich in protein and essential vitamins and minerals, perfectly adapted to Africa's soils and changing climate exist in Africa. They exist thanks not to the genius and beneficence of a foreign company, but rather through millennia of interactions between Africa's farmers and its landscape. And while their popularity waned in recent decades as urbanization has swept through the continent, they're gaining renewed interest from food-security experts. Unlike "exotic" (i.e., non-native to Africa) vegetables like kale and cabbage, these crops are adapted to Africa's soils and growing conditions. African vegetables like the leaves of amaranth, pumpkin, and cowpea (black-eyed pea) plants outshine rival western greens that have been introduced into African agriculture over the past century. Then there's the leaves of the moringa tree, native to Africa and parts of Asia, which deliver three times more vitamin A than carrots, seven times more vitamin C than oranges, and twice the protein of cow's milk, per 100 grams.

Of course, spiderplant and cowpea leaves are a long way from solving Africa's nutritional problems. As of 2013, indigenous vegetables accounted for just 6 percent of Kenya's total vegetable market. Despite growing demand production is constrained by the same factors that haunt African food security broadly: poor infrastructure (roads, rail, etc.) for bringing fresh food from farm to market, along with a dearth of investment in research and development. There are no simple answers, no silver bullets, to the problem of ensuring a robust food supply on a warming planet with a growing population. But it's important to remember that the best, cheapest solutions aren't necessarily the ones that emerge from patent-seeking laboratories.

From here 

Tobacco Is Bad for Food Security

Namibia imports over 60% of required food items from South Africa and this makes Namibia a net food importer. The local food supply/the country's capacity to feed its population is deficient, because of inadequate investment in agriculture and lack of land provided for agricultural production.

Namibia’s health minister Dr. Bernhard Haufiku criticized theplanned tobacco plantation in the Zambezi Region, in the process calling on all health conscious Namibians to join the fight against it. The tobacco plantation project is being fronted by Swapo Party big shot Armas Amukwiyu and his Chinese partners through their company Namibia Oriental Tobacco cc. The company applied for 10 000 hectares in the Zambezi Region to grow tobacco and maize already. Amukwiyu is a close associate of President Dr. Hage Geingob, a relationship which could further boost his chances to get the land.

Villagers in the area expressed concern over the tobacco project saying the plantation will curtail the grazing land for their livestock.

Suspended Swapo youth leader Job Amupanda, together with George Kambala and Dimbulukeni Nauyoma, who started the Affirmative Repositioning movement which seeks to help address the land issue in the country, objected to the land being used for tobacco production.

In their objection, the trio said: “In 2005 the Namibian National Assembly unanimously ratified the World Health Organisation Framework Convention for tobacco control whose objectives include protecting present and future generations from the devastating health, social, environmental and economic consequences of tobacco consumption.”  They further said Namibia has a serious food problem. “It is our submission that to allocate more land for tobacco than for food is a deviation from the policy direction taken by the Namibian government through its ministry of agriculture, which leans towards eradicating the country's capacity to provide established food security and adequate levels of nutrition.” 

The three also objected the allocation of land to foreigners. Amupanda said: “It cannot be correct that our most fertile land is used to produce drugs and not food.”

He said it is also alarming that government is distributing land to foreigners even in villages, adding “that tobacco contains nicotine, correlated with a dangerous condition called schizophrenia”.  Amupanda said although government speaks of banning foreign ownership, “politicians are awarding land to foreigners under the table”. “We take this principled action on realising that our country is speedily and scandalously being sold while the future generation is tricked into singing songs and clapping hands, waiting for a fictional year called '2030' where all our problems will apparently be solved; probably by ghosts only known to the political elite,” he concluded. 

Africa's Food Waste

Food waste in Africa and other developing nations is an entirely different problem than it is in developed regions. In developing regions, often the biggest chunk of food loss — more than 40 percent — occurs during the post-harvest phase, according to a 2011 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report. But in developed regions, the biggest chunk — again more than 40 percent — occurs at the retail and consumer levels.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, more than a third of fruits, vegetables, roots, and tubers are lost by the time they are processed or packaged, according to the FAO report, the most recent comprehensive estimate available. More precise estimates vary from year to year and from country to country. In Kenya, pests destroy up to 30 percent of all maize harvested — a total loss of about 162 million tons, according to the government-run Kenya Agricultural Research Institute. Ghana, meanwhile, loses up to 50 percent of its main crops of vegetables, fruits, cereals, roots, and tubers, said Joe Oteng-Adjei, the country's Minister for Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, according to the news service GhanaWeb.

Like much of sub-Saharan Africa, Tanzania produces all kinds of food for local consumption as well as export. Yet here, in the part of the world that can arguably least afford to waste food, a good portion of these crops are lost. Much of the loss happens before the food can be eaten, during the so-called "post-harvest" phase between harvest and the point of sale or consumption. The problem is that the equipment and methods that many small-scale farmers use to process and store their crops are inadequate, so months after the harvest, tons of corn might be infested with insects or contaminated with toxic mold. More perishable crops like fruits and vegetables may become inedible in a matter of days. Long a neglected aspect of the agricultural system in developing countries, this waste stream of food is starting to attract attention from global agriculture organizations and financial institutions, offering hope that the losses can be reduced, and with them rates of rural hunger and malnutrition.

The food waste problem has been neglected for so long that there's no long-term data to show whether these figures have changed over time. In fact, the FAO and other organizations have acknowledged that even existing estimates are not particularly reliable, because the measurement methods are haphazard at best. What's clear is that food in sub-Saharan Africa is being wasted on a large scale, and any progress in reducing that waste should benefit the region — and even the global food supply — significantly. A World Bank report, also issued in 2011, stated that even a 1 percent reduction in post-harvest losses could lead to annual economic gains of $40 million, much of it going directly to farmers.

The waste is an economic loss, but it is also a loss of precious nutrition and calories. The World Bank report estimated that the value of annual losses, $4 billion, exceeds the total value of food aid sent to sub-Saharan Africa in the decade up to 2008. Even as international efforts to reduce hunger in the region have increased, most of the dollars spent have focused on boosting crop yields, despite the lack of means for storing extra crops.

"More production is not going to be able to fill that gap that we're worried about to feed the world in the future. What we have to do is reduce losses," said Lisa Kitinoja, founder of the Oregon-based, nonprofit Postharvest Education Foundation.

How Not To Help Africa

Hunger, food security and ‘feeding the world’ is a political, social and economic problem and no amount of gene splicing is capable of surmounting obstacles like poor roads and insufficient irrigation. Talk about backward, regressive, primitive farming practices that would condemn millions to hunger and decimate the ecology is again playing on fear and emotion. Numerous official reports have argued that to feed the hungry in poorer regions we need to support diverse, sustainable agro-ecological methods of farming and strengthen local food economies: for example, see this UN report, this official report, this report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and this report by 400 experts which was twice peer reviewed.

GMOs are not necessary to feed the world. Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stated in April of last year: “We don’t have a goal of developing GM products here or to import them.  We can feed ourselves with normal, common, not genetically modified products.  If the Americans like to eat such products, let them eat them.  We don’t need to do that; we have enough space and opportunities to produce organic food.”

“We strongly object that the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly nor economically beneficial to us. We do not believe that such companies or gene technologies will help our farmers to produce the food that is needed in the 21st century. On the contrary, we think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millennia, and that it will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves.” – A statement signed by 24 delegates from 18 African countries to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in 1998.

Viva Kermani talking about the situation in India:

“… the statements that they [supporters of GMOs] use such as “thousands die of hunger daily in India” are irresponsible and baseless scare-mongering with a view to projecting GM as the only answer. When our people go hungry, or suffer from malnutrition, it is not for lack of food, it is because their right to safe and nutritious food that is culturally connected has been blocked. That is why it is not a technological fix problem and GM has no place in it.”

The Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) last year released a report that concluded hunger is caused by poverty and inequality and that we already produce enough food to feed the world’s population and did so even at the peak of the world food crisis in 2008. The report went on to say that current global food production provides enough to feed ten billion people and the recent food price crises of 2008 and 2011 both took place in years of record global harvests, clearly showing that these crises were not the result of scarcity. CBAN also noted that the GM crops that are on the market today are not designed to address hunger. Four GM crops account for almost 100 percent of worldwide GM crop acreage, and all four have been developed for large-scale industrial farming systems and are used as cash crops for export, to produce fuel or for processed food and animal feed.

The elite interests in the West have condemned tens of millions to hunger and poverty in Africa by enslaving them and their nations to debt by champions the type of privatisation, public expenditure reduction, deregulation, tax avoiding and ‘free’ trade policies that have ceded policy decision making to powerful corporate players. This has in turn led to a concentration of wealth and imposed ‘austerity’ and drives hunger, poverty, land grabs and the disappearance of family/peasant farms – the very bedrock of global food production. The agritech cartels offer more of the same by tearing up traditional agriculture for the benefit of corporate entities. The current global system of chemical-industrial agriculture and World Trade Organisation rules that agritech companies helped draw up for their benefit to force their products into countries are a major cause of structural hunger, poverty, illness and environmental destruction. By its very design, the system is meant to suck the life from people, nations and the planet for profit and control. Globally, agritech corporations are being allowed to shape government policy by being granted a strategic role in trade negotiations. They are increasingly setting the policy/knowledge framework by being allowed to fund and determine the nature of research carried out in public universities and institutes. They continue to propagate the myth that they have the answer to global hunger and poverty. It harks back to colonialism. Hasn’t the world had enough of that type of Western ‘humanitarianism’.

“… take capitalism and business out of farming in Africa. The West should invest in indigenous knowledge and agro-ecology, education and infrastructure and stand in solidarity with the food sovereignty movement.” Daniel Maingi, Growth Partners for Africa. “What the World Bank has done, the International Monetary fund, what AGRA and Bill Gates are doing, it’s actually pretty wrong. The farmer himself should not be starving”.

Extracts taken from a longer article by Colin Todhunter that can be read in full on this website 

GM or No GM - Hunger is caused by capitalism

Sub-Saharan Africa, hunger is a tremendous problem — and an ironic one. The region is home to abundant arable land; 70 percent of the population there farms. But the prevalence of hunger there is also the highest in the world — one in five people are undernourished. Chronic malnutrition has stunted the growth of 40 percent of children under the age of five, according to UNICEF. That’s 25 million kids. Africa was a major food exporter, sending out coffee, cocoa, and spices — but the price of commodities dropped in the 1980s, and imports have outpaced exports. Food production has mostly been stagnant since then, while consumption has grown, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Today, African countries spend $35 billion to $40 billion a year on imported food. Relying heavily on imports raises the price of regionally produced food, contributing to a cycle of poverty.

The Gates Foundation suggests that by using better fertilizer and more productive crops such as GMOs, African farmers could "theoretically double their yields." (The average yield per acre in Africa is one-fifth of that in the US.)  "With the right investments," the Gates Foundation goes on, it may be possible for farmers on the continent to "increase productivity by 50 percent overall." But even if GMO crops yield more produce, will that translate to less hunger?

Increasing food production may be a red herring: according to the World Food Programme, the planet actually produces enough food to feed everyone alive more than 2,000 calories a day. But global funding priorities remain "heavily focused on increasing agricultural production," according to a 2013 report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. "The perception that there is a supply-side problem is, however, questionable," the report reads. "Hunger and malnutrition are mainly related to a lack of purchasing power and/or the inability of the rural poor to be self-sufficient. Meeting the food security challenges is primarily about the empowerment of the poor and their food sovereignty." In other words: the primary problem isn’t technology, it’s distribution.

Farmers can’t afford the seeds they plant to feed their families; some are too poor to even feed themselves well, limiting their ability to work. During the famine in Ethiopia drivers delivering aid would come back saying that they drove through fields full of unharvested produce on their way to the drop off points. "In a lot of famines, you have food leaving the famine areas, because buying power has collapsed," says Gawain Kripke, the director of policy and research at Oxfam America. "It’s not supply or availability of food. There’s just no buying power.

Of the 54 states within the African Union, only 10 have allocated at least a tenth of their public investments to agriculture — that is, to infrastructure, irrigation, research, and development. About 30 percent of crops produced in Africa are lost after harvest, says Agnes Kalibata, the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an agricultural organization. \

"All the infrastructure we take for granted in a modern agricultural supply chain doesn’t exist in Africa," says Oxfam America’s Kripke. "So where do you start? Seeds? Roads?"

Roads are a safe bet, according to International Food Policy Research Institute. In fact, they’re one of the best investments governments can make. Not only do they get seeds and other agricultural products and technology into an area, roads are crucial for trade. Without access to roads, farmers tend to buy seeds at high prices and sell produce at lower ones, which exposes them to more risk from food price fluctuations. Sometimes, farmers are unable to sell their crops at all. And when that happens, farmers become apathetic about adopting new technology: what’s the point of increasing yield if most of it will rot, anyway? The introduction of roads in 15 rural villages in Ethiopia increased consumption by households by about 16 percent, while lowering poverty about 7 percent, according to a 2008 IFPRI study. More roads may also mean more information: currently agricultural extension programs — which help train farmers and educate them about the marketplace — can be tough for farmers to reach. That’s particularly true for about half of African farmers: women, who are less able to travel because of familial responsibilities or the hazards of the road. Uganda suffers from a dearth of infrastructure. Though the country is only slightly smaller than the UK, it has only 22,028 miles (3,264 km) of paved roads, compared to the UK’s 245,068 miles (394,428 km). That makes trade and transit quite difficult, especially since 85 percent of Uganda’s 36 million people live in rural areas. A quarter of the population is below the poverty line. As a result, almost 40 percent of children there are undernourished, according to the US government’s Feed the Future initiative. Without infrastructure — roads, granaries, markets, irrigation — and policy changes, more food won’t eliminate hunger. According to the Brookings Institute, Uganda should expect inflation in 2015 — the result of government borrowing, a depletion of foreign currency reserves, and cutbacks on essential supplies — that will "widen the income gap" and "reverse the gains made in poverty reduction." In other words: the economic situation in Uganda is set to reduce the purchasing power of the impoverished.

From here 

Problems never end

Half a million people in three West African nations rocked by Ebola are going hungry and that number could double by March if food supplies do not improve, two UN agencies warned. In Guinea, 230,000 people are estimated to be facing sever food shortages because of the impact of Ebola. By March 2015, the number is expected to rise to more than 470,000. Nearly 300,000 Liberians are expected to face severe food problems by March, up from 170,000 today.

In Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the countries at the heart of the worst recorded outbreak of Ebola, workers have been staying away from markets and fields for fear of spreading the virus that has killed more than 6,800 people since March. This fear has caused labour shortages on farms for planting and weeding and cut household incomes, compounding an economic slowdown in these three countries. Border closures and quarantines are disrupting supply chains, hindering market access and exacerbating shortages, raising fears that one million people from a combined population of 20 million could be going hungry by March.

"The outbreak has revealed the vulnerability of current food production systems and value chains in the worst Ebola-affected countries," Bukar Tijani, the Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) representative for Africa said in a statement. The FAO said more food needs to be imported into these countries which are facing a financial crunch because exports have dropped and recommended cash transfers or vouchers for affected people to buy food and help stimulate markets.

Denise Brown, a relief coordinator for the World Food Programme, said the situation regarding food supplies could get worse before improvements are seen from international efforts.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/1-million-people-could-be-hungry-by-march-due-to-ebola/

South Africans Going Hungry

 One in four people in South Africa do not have enough to eat, and half the population is at risk of hunger, despite the country producing more than enough food. Despite the nations’ farms producing enough calories to feed every one of its 54-million citizens, half of South Africans either face hunger or are at risk of hunger.  To cope, people skip meals, eat smaller portions or make do with cheap, poor-quality food.

According to Oxfam, low incomes, rising costs, a lack of access to productive resources and climate change are amongst the reasons causing 13 million people to go to bed hungry. One family of four was found to live on just R6 (USD$0.54) a day.

 “The children wake up hungry in the middle of the night. At times we feel it would be better if someone adopted them to give them a chance in life,” says Elzetta Vooges, 23, from the Eastern Cape. Elzetta describes feeling she is “rated the cheapest of the cheapest”.

Women and girls face hunger more often than men. They earn less than men for the same work, cannot work as many hours and find it harder to get jobs.  Despite this, they are often responsible for providing food for the family.

In the nine municipalities the price of staple foods, like maize have increased. Electricity prices have escalated by over 200% cumulatively since 2010, forcing people to choose between food and fuel.  The inequality of access to food across South African households is stark - the poorest spend 50% of their incomes on food whilst the richest 10% of the population spend only 10% on food, meaning any increases in prices hits the poorest pockets the hardest.

Access to food is also limited by food retailers’ control over pricing and availability. Five retailers control 60% of the formal retail market, leaving small and informal traders finding it hard to compete.  The food industry has been plagued by collusion and price fixing scandals. Prices are inflated whilst farmworkers often struggle to survive in meager wages, or face losing their jobs completely. Without access to land, water and  tools many poor communities don’t even have the ability to produce their own food.

 Changes in the climate are now taking its toll and that means some cannot grow or store food as they once used to.  “We used to eat fresh food from our gardens, but now it’s impossible because of the high temperatures that make it impossible for us to work in our gardens” explained Community member from Eastern Cape.

Oxfam’s Rashmi Mistry said: “The right to sufficient food is enshrined in the constitution but government policies have failed for one in four South Africans.  October has been adopted by the government as food security month but just increasing production and creating one giant food mountain will not help the poorest and does not go far enough to address the root causes of hunger.  We need better implemented policies that are developed with those most affected by hunger and backed by legislation that holds everyone to account for people having enough to eat.”

From here

The Predatory Agricultural-Industrial Complex In Africa

Controlling seed means controlling food production. Africans must choose how they farm. They must not become perpetually indebted to a predatory, profit-driven agricultural-industrial complex.

In order to address Africa’s poor agricultural productivity international players are intent on criminalising traditional seed saving practices. This thrust is directed by a triumvirate of corporate interests, actively assisted by first world governments and front organisations parading as non-governmental organisations.

Africa lies at the frontier of international agricultural intervention for several reasons. Firstly the continent lags badly in agricultural productivity. This is largely due to poor investment and agricultural support.
Secondly, Africa has more unexploited arable land than any other continent. Africa’s vast area, inadequate historical investment or support into agricultural development makes it an attractive investment destination for speculators and development alike.
Thirdly Africa’s population is set increase from its present 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion by 2050. Because of endemic food insecurity, agricultural development is a moral and economic obligation for both the African and the international community.

These facts have resulted in a new rush to assist Africa to help itself. However this assistance is motivated by often conflicting aims and consequences. While speculators seek to cash in on opportunities, philanthropy and development are not neutral either.
Africa has a history of exploitation. It continues to haemorrhage money, losing tens of millions of dollars daily in illicit flows. Speculation, aid and assistance are seldom unconditional.
This is borne out by the recent drive to impose an unsuitable, first-world intellectual property regime on the sale and trade of seed. This will worsen this problem by firmly placing control of the agricultural supply chain into corporate hands, further disempowering the smallholder farmer community.

Western agencies have long portrayed subsistence farming as inefficient, not just in terms of productivity but primarily because of its failure to contribute to capital flows. This sector circulates very little money through the agricultural supply chain, even when farmers are food secure. This lack of financial clout renders the sector profoundly vulnerable.
It is incorrect to portray smallholder farming as inefficient and unsuitable. In fact it is more conducive to community and regional food security than large-scale industrialised agricultural production methods.
This was underlined by a World Bank and UN expert report which explained how food security relies on a “multifunctionary” approach to agricultural production. Farming is about more than only producing food; it is also about culture, medicinal plants, the maintenance of ecological integrity, self-sufficiency, governance, public participation and inclusion.

Several institutions have emerged to drive the improvement of African food production . . . .
  . . . The most obvious risk is the direct intervention of the world’s largest seed companies. While these powerful entities purportedly wish to assist, they have applied constant pressure to impose this restrictive intellectual property regime.
South Africa has been a springboard for this intervention into sub-Saharan Africa. Its own seed market is effectively controlled by the world’s two biggest seed companies, Monsanto and DuPont’s Pioneer. Because of their investment into seed research and genetic material – for instance Monsanto purchased Malawi’s national seed company, while Pioneer recently acquired South Africa’s last large seed company Pannar in 2011 – they maintain tight control of their investments through intellectual property regimes.
These companies also sell genetically modified (GM) seed and agricultural chemicals. While both AGRA and the Gates Foundation have supported GM technology as a real solution to food security, the IAASTD report downplayed any significant potential. Experts feel GM is a technical response to broader, more systemic problems like poor infrastructure and concentrated supply chains.

Grassroots opposition has emerged as it is felt that UPOV 91 will effectively outlaw traditional seed saving and sharing. A statement drafted by more than 75 representative national and regional agricultural organisations strongly objects to the ARIPO protocol and calls for its withdrawal.
Despite this, powerful vested interests remain fixated on securing control of African agricultural production through force, artifice and stealth. This is directly counter to the principle that equality of fair opportunity be afforded to both innovators and those who develop and rely on traditional seed exchange.

Using first world mechanisms to perpetuate the colonial model is by definition neo-colonial.
Controlling seed means controlling food production. Africans must choose how they farm. They cannot be allowed to become perpetually indebted to a predatory agricultural-industrial complex.


full article here

Capitalism is the silent crisis

Tegegnework Gettu, director of the United Nations Development  Programme’s Africa bureau, writes in the preface of the Human Development Report. “Africa is not fated to starve. That is an affront to both its dignity and its potential… Africa must stop begging for food… Had the African governments over the last 30 years met their people’s aspirations, the report would not be necessary. One quarter of the people in sub-Saharan Africa would not be undernourished, and one third of African children would not be stunted.” He went on to say “Hunger and malnutrition remain pervasive on a continent with ample agricultural endowments. Africa has the knowledge, the technology, and the means to end hunger and insecurity.”

Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo echoed Mr Gettu’s words, saying that African leadership should be indicted in the area of food production. “It tells us what we know: that the poverty of Africa is the making of African leaders over the years.”

During Asia’s green revolution, for example, many Asian countries spent up to 20% of their budgets on agriculture, while African countries currently spend between 5 to 10% on the sector. This is despite African leaders’ commitment in 2003 to allocate at least 10% of national budgets to agriculture. At the moment, Africa spends more on the military than on agriculture.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s most food-insecure region and where poverty is particularly alarming, according to UNDP. Up to 25% of sub-Saharan Africa’s 856 million people are undernourished, with 15 million people facing serious risks in the Sahel and an equal number in the Horn of Africa. The worsening food situation dampens glowing reports on Africa’s fast-growing economies, which have expanded by an annual average of 5% to 6% during the past decade.

However, notes  Helen Clark, UNDP administrator “Impressive GDP growth rates in Africa have not translated into the elimination of hunger and malnutrition.”

In addition to the impact of drought on food security, famines often also get the headlines, even though uneven access to food due to low incomes is as much a problem. “The silent crises of chronic malnourishment and seasonal hunger do not receive nearly enough attention,” notes the report. Increased agricultural production does not necessarily guarantee food security.

The capitalist logic

Half a century after agricultural productivity surged in Asia, eastern Europe and Latin America, with cereal yields jumping from 1 tonne a hectare in 1960 to more than 3 tonnes last year, Africa has yet to see a serious increase in production. Cereal yields in sub-Saharan countries have risen to only 1.3 tonnes per hectare, up from 0.8 tonnes.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, productivity in African farming failed to keep pace with population growth. Any increases reflected bringing more land under cultivation rather than increasing yields. As a result, domestic food production per capita fell, forcing African countries to rely on imports, and spend billions of US dollars each year buying commodities such as wheat, sugar and rice from international trading houses.  The over-reliance on food imports put countries against the wall once wholesale prices surged. The 2007-08 food crisis – the first in three decades – which saw record prices for rice and wheat, triggered riots in several African countries, including protests in Nigeria and Senegal.

Akinwumi Adesina, Nigeria’s agriculture minister, told an audience: “Nigeria was food self-sufficient in the 1960s and well-known for its global position in major agricultural commodities.” Then something changed. “We found oil and became too dependent on it. Nigeria soon became a net food importer, spending on average $11bn a year on wheat, rice, sugar and fish alone.”

Why can't Africa feed itself??

Sub-Sahara Africa has ample fertile land, plenty of water and a generally favourable climate for food production. It also has some of the fastest growing economies. Yet, the region is the world’s most food insecure. Even though 70 per cent of Africans are farmers, the continent continues to experience hunger and famine, especially in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel region. One in four people in sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished, and every third child is stunted, according to a 2012 human development report of the United Nations Development Programme. Ironically, countries that heavily rely on agriculture are worst affected by food insecurity. That is because 90 per cent of Africa’s food supply is produced by smallholders. And they produce so little, that half of them are food insecure themselves.

 “The main reason for Africa’s food insecurity is lack of political will,” Nelson Agyemang, Vice- President of the Ghana Cooperative for Agricultural Producers, said during a recent agriculture conference in Cape Town, South Africa. 

The reasons for food insecurity are complex. They include crop failure due to droughts and floods, poverty, conflict and HIV. But misguided policies and weak institutions are the main culprits for hunger, experts argue.

“Chronic food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa stems from decades of poor governance,” said UNDP regional director for Africa Tegegnework Gettu.

Self-serving elites are monopolizing state revenues while emptying the country’s resources

The Blooming of the Sahel

Climate change is expected to hit Africa hardest.  It is increasingly likely that scientific warnings that the world could warm by 2°C in the next 20 or 30 years will come true.  In such a case, pastoralism will be imperiled.  The effects on the African continent will be dramatically more devastating under a warming scenario of 4°C.

Over the centuries, some 16 million pastoralists have perfected the art of survival in the Sahel, raising sheep and livestock in some of the most harsh and unforgiving environments anywhere on the planet.  Meat yields from the Sahel rival those from some of the best ranches in Australia and the United States.  Currently, half of the meat and two-thirds of the milk produced and consumed in the countries of West Africa originates in the Sahel.

Farming is  the dominant industry in the region, which accounts for one-third and more of all economic output in the Sahel. This in turn empowers the women of the Sahel, as women account for the majority of Africa’s farmers. Supporting pastoralism with more climate smart-policies; reducing vulnerability to drought, flooding and other disasters; and raising more healthy livestock through timely vaccines, are all necessary to help communities adapt to the ecological harshness of the Sahel.

However pastoralism is facing multiple threats. Rapid population growth, conflict, volatile food prices, animal diseases, and shrinking grazing areas and water resources are steadily jeopardizing the survival of the pastoralists of the Sahel.  

Sahel’s vast water resources are largely untapped.  In a region where farming is the predominant economic activity, sadly, only 20 percent of the Sahel’s irrigation potential has been developed.  Worse still, one quarter of the area equipped with irrigation lies in a state of disrepair.

Bringing more water to parched lands in the Sahel will not only improve food production but place more food on family dinner tables...Climate-smart agriculture can increase yields... help protect biodiversity, improve soil fertility, and conserve the environment.

Makhtar Diop,
World Bank Group’s Vice President for Africa

Africa's hunger

Food production in sub-Saharan Africa must rise by 50% to feed an estimated population of 1.3-billion by 2030, according to a report.

12 sub-Saharan Africa countries are severely affected by food security problems. These include Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique and Lesotho. It shows only four countries in the region have high food security — SA, Gabon, Angola and Nigeria. Food security is closely entwined with poverty — food MAY be available but unaffordable for many people in the region.

In the 40 years to 2010, per capita world food production grew 17%, while in Africa it fell 10%.

Sub-Saharan Africa has 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land. It imports an average of $50bn of food annually. Yields on staple crops such as maize, rice, groundnuts and sorghum in sub-Saharan Africa are only one-third to two-thirds of the global average. Grain yields generally are 40% lower than those in the rest of the developing world.

At present, eight sub-Saharan African countries are suffering from lack of water and that number will increase to 18 by 2025, affecting 600-million Africans.
Africa has 13 tractors per 100 sq. km., far below the global average of 200.