Vol. 3 No. 1 Specials

Every day, 799 million people in developing countries – 18% of the world’s population – do not have enough to eat. In the hardest hit regions of the world, malnutrition has reached pandemic proportions, rendering it nearly as lethal and devastating as AIDS. Although malnutrition ranks as one of man’s oldest public health concerns, in the twenty-first century it is as prevalent as ever. In parts of the world like southern Africa, access to food has actually been been declining in recent years, endangering the region’s fragile social and economic balance. Because adequate nutrition provides an essential foundation for virtually all aspects of physical and social health, African governments cannot improve the region’s health standards without first addressing the underlying problems of undernourishment and food insecurity.

In 1992 an ambitious coalition of African states attempted to address the problem of food security by founding the Southern African Development Community (SADC), uniting in common cause the governments of Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. This region, once referred to as Africa’s “breadbasket,” boasts an estimated total population of 238.8 million people. Part of the SADC’s declared mission is to preserve “food security” in southern Africa, which it defines as the condition prevailing “when sufficient food is available to meet the nutritional needs of everyone in the region and [when] all members of a household, nation or region have the means to access the food they need for a normal, healthy and active life.” To this end, the SADC has attempted to increase household income, in part by raising awareness about practices that increase agricultural productivity and improve the quality of life. The results of these efforts, however, have been disappointing. In spite of the SADC program, the area has suffered a decline in agricultural production over the last decade.

The problem is not that the economies of southern Africa are ignoring agriculture: in fact, it makes up 35% of the region’s gross domestic product and 13% of its total exports. A full three-quarters of the region’s people depend on agriculture to make a living. Nevertheless, the yields of the most important crops in the region – namely maize, millet, sorghum, yam, and cassava – have dropped significantly in recent years. Natural factors such as changing climatic conditions and crop and livestock diseases are partially to blame. A regional drought in 2004, for example, precipitated major food crises in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Swaziland, and Lesotho.

The entirety of the food deficit cannot be blamed on climate change, however. Population pressure, for one, has prevented small-scale farmers from practicing rotational agriculture, leading to soil degradation and reduced fertility. The irony, though, is that just as Africa’s rising population and decreasing productivity are putting additional demands on the domestic grain market, international market pressures are causing much of that grain to be shipped away. In southern Africa, the “commodification” of food has become synonymous with its export: as lucrative international markets begin to open up to African agriculture, African governments yields. Although poverty levels are declining in other parts of the world, sub-Saharan Africa still lags behind other regions in terms of socioeconomic development, with over 40% of the region’s citizens living on less than one dollar per day. As poverty levels increase, hunger and undernourishment spread across the region; the threat of disease follows close behind. Limited access to health facilities and resources render the poor and the hungry still more vulnerable to disease. For example, less than half of the people in southern Africa have access to safe drinking water, leading to unhealthy hygienic practices that culminate in region-specific illnesses such as cholera.