12:24 GMT 31st August 2011
Months ago, aid agencies had warned of an impending food crisis in the region as drought, failed harvests and fighting in some areas led to increasing food insecurity. Now conditions are so grim that the UN has turned to a word it uses sparingly and specifically - famine.
The issue has been brought to stark reality by a recent joint Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Bank report, which revealed that countries in sub-Saharan Africa lose around $4bn worth of grain a year because of poor storage. 'This lost food could meet the minimum annual food requirements of at least 48 million people,' said Maria Helena Semedo, the FAO Assistant Director-General. 'If we agree that sustainable agricultural systems need to be developed to feed nine billion people by 2050, addressing waste across the entire food chain must be a critical pillar of future national food strategies,' she said.
According to estimates provided by the African Postharvest Losses Information System, physical grain losses prior to processing can range from 10 to 20 per cent of African annual production, which is worth $27bn. Losses occur when grain decays or is infested by pests, fungi or microbes. But the waste can also be economic, resulting from low prices and lack of access to markets for poor quality or contaminated grain.
According to the report, food losses contribute to high food prices by removing part of the food supply from the market. They also have a negative environmental impact as land, water and resources such as fertiliser and energy are used to produce, process, handle and transport food that no one consumes.
'Reducing food losses is increasingly recognised as part of an integrated approach to realising agriculture's full potential, along with making effective use of today's crops, improving productivity on existing farmland, and sustainably bringing additional acreage into production,' said Jamal Saghir, the Director of the Sustainable Development Department of the World Bank's Africa Region.
A variety of practices and technologies are available for reducing post-harvest losses, including crop 'protectants' and storage containers such as hermetically sealed bags and metallic silos, the report notes. These technologies have proved successful in Asia, but the experts say more research is needed to identify methods adapted to local environments in Africa. In order to succeed interventions must be sensitive to local conditions and practices, according to the experts.
The report recommends that governments create enabling conditions for farmers by reducing market transaction costs through investing in infrastructure such as roads, electricity and water, and strengthening agricultural research and extension services.
Clearly, the AU should take the lead in investing in post-harvest technologies to reduce the losses and boost the continent's food security. But first, African governments should stop making agriculture the continent's most neglected sector. It should be the most important because of Africa's comparative advantage in the field.
'Until farming is commercially viable, there will always be hunger in Africa,' say Mark Ashurst and Stephen Mbithi in a paper entitled, Why Africa can make it big in agriculture, for London-based Africa Research Institute last year.
Last month, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made the same point when he said that although the world body was rushing in emergency food to the Horn, this was a short-term move. Long-term, he would like to see concrete efforts aimed at boosting food security in the region, calling for an agricultural transformation that improves the livelihoods of rural communities in the region.
'Short-term relief must be linked to building long-term sustainability. This means an agricultural transformation that improves the resilience of rural livelihoods and minimises the scale of any future crisis,' Ban said in a message to delegates attending a UN-convened emergency ministerial meeting on the Horn of Africa in Rome.
'It means climate-smart crop production, livestock rearing, fish farming and forest maintenance practices that enable all people to have year-round access to the nutrition they need,' Ban said.
In short, Ban is referring to food security, something that is lacking in the Horn of Africa. While many countries around the world face food security crises, with large numbers of people hungry and unable to find enough food, only rarely do the conditions meet the humanitarian community's formal criteria for a famine. The last time it was used in Somalia, for example, was in 1991/92, despite several periods of protracted drought and other problems in the intervening years.
According to the UN, a famine can be declared only when certain measures of mortality, malnutrition and hunger are met. They are: at least 20 per cent of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope; acute malnutrition rates exceed 30 per cent; and the death rate exceeds two persons per day per 10,000 persons. Other factors considered in the affected areas of Somalia include large-scale displacement, widespread destitution, disease outbreaks and social collapse.
The definition has been developed through the work of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which includes specialists from humanitarian agencies, including the FAO and the World Food Programme (WFP), as well as leading non-governmental organisations and government aid agencies.
The gathering of data to determine whether the criteria are met is in this case in the hands of the UN-backed Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit-Somalia (FSNAU), which is administered by the FAO. FSNAU then passes the information to the UN, aid agencies and the US Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
The declaration of a famine carries no binding obligations on the UN or member states, but serves to focus global attention on the problem. According to the WFP, famines have been declared previously in southern areas of Sudan in 2008; in Gode in the Somali region of Ethiopia in 2000; in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in 1996; in Somalia in 1991-1992, and Ethiopia in 1984-1985.
The challenge facing Africa and the world in regard to food security is that by 2050 there will be nine billion people on the planet and demand will have increased by 70 per cent, according to official prognosis. 'This demand must be met despite flat lining yields, increasing water scarcity and growing competition over land,' noted a recent report by Oxfam.
In the case of Africa, the issue of selfsufficiency has been constantly mentioned by governments and the AU as well as leading personalities such as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. 'It is time for Africa to produce its own food and sustain self-sufficiency in food production,' Annan said in 2008. The point is, this should be taken for granted, given that 75 per cent of Africans depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.
But, as experts argue, the issue should be one of food security in Africa instead of self-sufficiency in food. After all, rural families in most of Africa are able to feed themselves from the small plots of land where they grow food for their consumption. They do not grow food for the urban mass, which does not till the land but places huge pressure on food supplies. Inevitably, most African countries depend on food imports to satisfy their agriculturally unproductive urban populations.
'The lesson is that growing enough food to feed the family is not the best policy for every farmer - as many arguments for selfsufficiency can imply,' noted Ashurst and Mbithi. 'National food security is a legitimate priority for governments, but not an end in itself. The bigger picture is just that - bigger.'
Smallholder farmers, it would seem, hold the key to unlocking Africa's agricultural potential. They are the backbone of the food system and they represent Africa's single biggest opportunity to increase food production, boost food security and reduce vulnerability. What they need to succeed, say the experts, are resources such as water, technology, investment and credit - not to mention proper storage facilities for crops.
A feature of the financial and material response to disasters in A frica is that it has been invariably foreign-led. How long this will last in a world of growing financial instability is a matter of conjecture. For instance, in 2010, only 63 per cent of UN emergency appeals were funded. Indeed, at the time of writing, Ban was bemoaning the fact that only half of the $2bn needed to respond to the famine in the Horn of Africa has been raised. 'He called for urgent international efforts to meet the gap in the humanitarian requirements for the region,' his spokesman said.
So, it is clear that African governments will have to make the reduction of hunger and food insecurity their top priority or else in a few years time, the continent will be witnessing yet another famine in the vulnerable Horn of Africa.
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