Causing Hunger: An overview of the food crisis in Africa

Causing Hunger: An overview of the food crisis in Africa (pdf 268.8 kb)

Executive Summary

‘We used to have a big farm – five hectares. We sold it one hectare at a time to pay to live. Now we can’t cultivate any more...We don’t have food because there is no-one to go and find food: my eldest children are dead.  Before, I was able to work, but now we stay with hunger because there is nothing I can do. We miss our land.’
- Milembe Mwandu, Shinyanga, Tanzania, April 2006

In 1960 Oxfam helped set up the Freedom from Hunger Campaign with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It was the first attempt to address the problem of food insecurity with something more than sacks of food aid for the hungry. The campaign set out to involve developing countries in analysing the causes of food crises and malnutrition, and to find sustainable solutions; in short, to enable people to grow or earn enough to feed themselves.

Forty-six years later, that worthy intention has plainly not been fulfilled in all parts of the world. While conditions vary greatly across Africa, across Sub Saharan Africa as a whole thirty-three per cent of Africans are under-nourished, compared with 17 per cent of people in developing countries as a whole. The proportion rises to 55 per cent in Central Africa.   The average number of food emergencies in Africa per year almost tripled since the mid 1980s.

Another failure is on the horizon. The commitment made by governments to halve hunger by 2015, as part of the Millennium Development Goals, will not be met in Africa at current rates of progress.   

These failures stem in part from the fact that, despite the promises of 1960 and many others made since, emergency aid, and food aid in particular, has remained the chief instrument to address food crises. Food aid does save lives, but it does not offer long-term solutions, and at worst it may exacerbate food insecurity. This is well known; yet spending on humanitarian aid has risen substantially, while aid for agricultural production in Sub Saharan Africa dropped by 43 per cent between 1990-92 to 2000-02. And neither African nor rich-country governments have done enough to tackle the root causes of hunger. We must now face the fact that we are dealing with food crises in Africa that may, in part, be blamed on the developmental inadequacies of our responses to earlier ones.

In mitigation, some of the causes of the current devastating food emergencies facing Africa could not have been foreseen 46 years ago. HIV/AIDS is exacting a terrifying toll on one of Africa’s key resources for food production – people. By 2020, a fifth of the agricultural workforce in southern African countries will have been claimed by AIDS. 

Climate change is another unprecedented threat to food security. This will particularly affect the most vulnerable – smallholders and nomadic pastoralists – who are reliant on rain-fed agriculture. Researchers have credibly predicted that 55 to 65 milllion more Africans will be at risk of hunger by the 2080s, as a result of a global temperature rise of less than 2.5°C.

Most striking, however, is the deadly impact of Africa’s conflicts, which are the cause of more than half the continent’s food crises. In every country that has suffered a prolonged food emergency, war or civil strife has played a major part. Although African governments have a responsibility to protect their populations, there is persistent failure to do so, as witnessed in northern Uganda, or even complicity in violence as occurred in Darfur.

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According to the FAO, the proportion of human-induced food emergencies has more than doubled over the last 14 years.  But what humans have broken, humans can mend. Oxfam firmly believes that the hunger and starvation seen in much of Africa in this first decade of the 21st century are no more inevitable than they are morally acceptable.

The world has the resources and know-how to guarantee the right to food, which is enshrined in United Nations (UN) conventions.  And this is not a side-issue: malnutrition is crippling to both individuals and society. At its most extreme, hunger kills, with young children and babies often the first to die. More commonly it weakens people, draining them of the energy that they need to work, and making them more prone to disease. Extreme malnutrition in children reduces school performance and causes long-term brain damage, which affects their future livelihoods and reduces economic growth . The provision of proper nutrition and food security is central to achieving many of the Millenium Development Goals, such as reducing poverty and child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating disease. To help Africa to fulfill its potential we must address the problem of hunger.

This paper describes two key challenges in reducing hunger in Africa. The first is to improve the immediate response to food crises. The second is to tackle the root causes of acute and recurring hunger. The paper is not a complete explanation of causes and solutions. Rather, it hopes to offer some insights based on Oxfam’s program experience and research with pastoralists, farmers, and others across Africa.

Better emergency response

First, the  emergency, or ‘humanitarian’, system must be overhauled, so that it is truly able to deliver prompt, effective assistance on the basis of need. It must support people’s livelihoods as well as meeting the immediate needs of the hungry. The stop-start approach must give way to longer-term support, wherever possible delivered through governments as part of their wider social protection programmes, backed by reliable funding.

In recent years, international emergency assistance to sub-Saharan Africa has increased and it has helped save many lives. However, it is often still too little too late, and there remain gross inequalities in its distribution. The timing and scale of a response are often driven more by political interests and media exposure than by objectively assessed humanitarian need.

Moreover, the type of aid is still often inappropriate. It is not right that 70 per cent of food aid distributed by the UN is still the produce of the developed world: food aid should not be a means of supporting farmers in these countries. When hunger is caused by lack of access to food as a result of poverty, rather than food shortages, providing cash can be a more appropriate, faster, and less expensive response. This must  be backed by efforts to restore affected people’s livelihoods.

Tackling poverty, developing agriculture

Second, and more fundamentally, if food crises are to be averted, much more must be done to tackle the root causes of hunger. That means tackling poverty and the power imbalances that underpin it. The number of people in sub-Saharan Africa who subsist on less than a dollar a day has almost doubled since 1981, to 313 million people in 2001, representing 46 per cent of the population. Most of Africa’s poor and undernourished people live in rural areas.  Smallholders, nomadic pastoralists, and women are particularly vulnerable to hunger due to marginalisation and neglect. The joint effort promised by African governments and donor governments to eradicate poverty must therefore deliver rural policies that involve and prioritise these vulnerable groups. Even small improvements in what they produce and earn will have a major impact in reducing hunger, as well as driving equitable growth.

There are no blueprints for effective agricultural policy. This should be determined country-by-country, through consultation between governments, civil society and donors, and agricultural producers themselves. However, a key ingredient must be proper investment in long-term rural development programmes and infrastructure, including support for organizations that represent the voices of marginalised groups. African governments have committed themselves to increase their spending on the rural sector to 10 per cent of their budgets. This should be backed by greater external assistance financed from the recent G8 commitments to increase development aid and debt relief. 

An important lesson from the flawed market reforms introduced from the 1980s by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, backed by the major donors, is that rural markets on their own cannot deliver food security. State action is also needed. There is growing evidence, for example, that government policies to stabilise prices, to provide cash transfers or targeted agricultural inputs, can be a more timely and cost-effective way (than emergency food aid) of ensuring food security.

However, major efforts are needed to improve the quality of government intervention, which too often has been dogged by corruption and weak capacity. Moreover, donor institutions such as the World Bank are rightly accused of having fallen short of their own declared standards, in failing to enforce conditions that would ensure proper use and full accountability of loans and aid. Governments and donors must ensure that resources are translated into concrete benefits for Africa’s poor and hungry. This will require a major role for local civil society organizations in monitoring aid flows and speaking out when things go wrong. Not to do so is to betray the hungry of Africa.

Industrialised countries must also do much more to ensure that unjust international trade rules do not destroy rural livelihoods. They must act to stabilise the volatile commodity prices which create such hardship for African producers. The rich-country trading blocs must stop forcing open African markets for their own benefit, and end the dumping of their subsidised farm produce.

Conflict, HIV/AIDS, and climate change

The fact that more than 50 per cent of Africa’s current food crises can be explained by armed conflict and the consequent displacement of millions of people underlines the need for urgent action to bring peace. National governments should play the central role, but the Africa Union has a vital task in pressing for peaceful solutions and in  providing security for citizens when governments are unable or unwilling to do so, as in Darfur. It is also the responsibility of the wider international community to give diplomatic, economic and, where necessary, military support to peace processes and peace-keeping, under UN auspices. International action to control the arms trade is an essential complementary step.

Over the last decade, the international and national response to HIV/AIDS in Africa has slowly been improving, and health spending has risen.  Yet by 2005, nine out of ten Africans in need of AIDS medicines were still not receiving them. Donor governments need to significantly increase their assistance to health services to stem HIV/AIDS and other diseases that cripple so many of Africa’s communities.

Since climate change is set to drastically increase poverty and hunger in Africa, Northern governments need to intensify their efforts to reduce emissions of green-house gases, as well as fund climate adaptation plans in Africa. African governments must also step up action to halt the land degradation which contributes to climate change.

The Way Forward

The story of nearly half-a-century of attempts at sophisticated and sustainable solutions to hunger in Africa is not a happy one. But there is hope. Too often we are told that food crises are now the norm in parts of Africa, that corruption is ineradicable, that the era of post-colonial conflicts will never end, that natural disasters and resulting food shortages can only increase. This is untrue:  there is good news from Africa and, as detailed in some of the following pages, ideas abound for ways to address all these pressing challenges.

Though the scale of the challenges seems daunting, in the last year there have been unprecedented promises by African governments and the international community to tackle poverty and food insecurity. A major investment in tackling the root causes could work and it will cost the world far less – in money and human life – than continuing the cycle of too little, too late that has been the reality of famine relief in Africa for nearly half a century.