Mail & Guardian | 27 Feb - 5 Mar 2009

Solutions to a rising food crisis in Southern African countries are becoming more elusive, writes Kristin Palitza

What’s the price tag on hunger? A whopping $30 billion. That’s what’s needed each year to feed the world’s 5.7 million starving people – a number that’s expected to grow to eight billion within the next four decades.

Even in South Africa, which is usually used as a model country for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, 39% of the population is vulnerable to food insecurity, whereas 22% of children under the age of nine are stunted because of chronic malnutrition, according to the National Institute for Economic Policy.

Food security is one of the biggest hurdles for SADC, where all member countries’ populations face malnutrition and famine.

Agricultural experts blamed high oil prices, lack of investment in agriculture, unfair trade policies and inequitable distribution of produce for continually increasing food insecurity, when they convened for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) governing council in Rome last week.

They said if the trend persists, food security levels will plummet – especially in the long term. “If agriculture continues to be done business as usual, productivity could decline a further ten percent to 25 percent by 2080,” warned Hans Herren, president of the Washington DC-based Millennium Institute, an NGO promoting long-term, integrated, global thinking. “Such trends clearly threaten the possibility to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.”

In some regions, such as southern Africa, the decline in yield could even reach up to 50 percent, because food production, donor aid flows, government budgetary allocations to agriculture and rural development have declined over the past 13 years, while food imports, food aid and populations have substantially increased.

So far, efforts to boost agricultural production have shown little results. Most yield increases have taken place in developed countries, while agricultural production in developing nations has risen by less than one percent, according to IFAD.

Development aid for agriculture shrunk to 2.9 percent in 2006 from 18 percent in 1979, IFAD researchers noted. As a result, the annual growth rate of agricultural productivity, particularly in developing countries, dropped from 3.5 percent in the 1980s to 1.5 percent today.

But in Southern Africa agriculture is key to the ecnomy. I it contributes about one-third of the region's Gross National Product (GNP) and accounts for 20 percent of total foreign exchange earnings. About 80 percent of the 240 million people living in the region depend on agriculture for food, income and employment.

“Paradoxically, among most of the world’s hungry are those who produce food,” said Laurent Thomas, director of the emergency operations and rehabilitation division of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). “To address the root cause of the food crisis, we need to support small-scale farmers and livestock owners.”

African governments have not done their share to promote sustainable, local agriculture, lamented Ides de Willebois, director of IFAD’s Eastern and Southern Africa division. “They have hampered agricultural development through export taxes and restrictions and import subsidies.”

What’s more, southern African countries re-invest only four percent of their agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while the rest of the world ploughs back ten percent of its GDP into food production, de Willebois said.

Tanzanian ambassador Wilfried Joseph Ngirwa, however, insisted “the political will to invest in agriculture [in Southern Africa] is there”.

Yet, nothing much has changed since heads of SADC member states acknowledged “that the major underlying reasons for the prevalence of hunger in the region include inappropriate national agricultural and food policies and inadequate access by farmers to key agricultural inputs and markets” as part of the 2004 Dar-Es-Salaam Declaration On Agriculture And Food Security.

At the end of the 2007/8 agricultural season, for example, Lesotho and Swaziland announced huge shortfalls in food production, relying on its neighbours to supply them with surplus yields, while serious flooding in many low-lying areas destroyed crops in Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Madagascar.

According to SADC deputy executive secretary Joao Caholo, the region suffered a cereal deficit of 4.35 million tons in 2007/2008, twice as much as in the previous farming season.

Experts agreed that, technically, the world could be fed, if governments fixed the relationship between smallholder food production, distribution channels, equitable access to food and policy regulation of agriculture instead of supporting international conglomerates, mono-cropping and biotechnologies.

“Governments should be the representatives of the people, but they actually represent private industry and let business dictate agricultural policies,” said Herren. “They continue to practice unfair agriculture.”

IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze agreed that “our challenge is to make agriculture the central focus of governments’, particularly in the developing world. “Policies should prioritise community-driven development with farmers at the centre,” he added.

Apart from food production, a key reason for food insecurity and upward spiralling food prices has been the high cost of oil and other forms of energy. “Paradoxically, ‘real’ food prices have been falling for a long time. What determines the end price of agricultural produce is the energy market,” said Dr Josef Schmidhuber, head of FAO’s global perspectives study unit.

The cost of energy needed to produce and transport food adds heavily to its price, he explained, and so the world’s food prices are directly linked to the global price of oil. “The entire chain of food production, food prices and, ultimately, poverty and hunger will hinge on the energy market,” Schmidhuber predicted.