SOUTHERN AFRICA: New approaches needed to food security

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SOUTHERN AFRICA: New approaches needed to food security

IRIN News, 07 May 2003

JOHANNESBURG - The impact of HIV/AIDS on food security in Southern Africa is now well recognised. The critical question is what can be done to halt the slide into poverty by affected households, a report released on Wednesday by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) said.

"Even in situations where the maize harvest is quite good, as it appears to be this season at the regional level, the fact that we have such high [HIV] infection rates requires more livelihood support interventions than otherwise would be the case. Good [cereal] production may not be enough to sustain people as it would have been 10 years ago," Neil Marsland, one of the authors of the report, told IRIN.

Southern Africa has the world's heaviest HIV/AIDS rates. "The impacts of HIV/AIDS on food security in the context of the 2002 food emergency are strong and negative. It also suggests that these impacts are complex and require urgent and innovative responses in the 2003-04 marketing year and beyond," the report by SADC's regional Vulnerability Assessment Committee, noted.

It suggested a "three-pronged attack" through humanitarian assistance programming and government policy, focusing on consumption-side support, productivity enhancement and household and community safety nets.

Awareness of the decline in quantity and quality of labour should be an integral part of the programme design in areas with high HIV/AIDS prevalence. Food-for-work programmes, for example, should be designed so that the type of labour expected would be consistent with the capacities of adults not at the peak of their health, and the elderly.

"Given the fundamental decline in income and agricultural production experienced by HIV/AIDS affected households, the analysis supports the need for continued consumption-oriented assistance to these households in the form of safety net programmes, even after the immediate emergency has passed. HIV/AIDS affected households will take longer to 'recover' from a shock, and may never fully do so. Accessing food will continue to be a foremost and formidable challenge of HIV/AIDS affected households long after a crisis subsides," the report said.

Productivity support should focus on improving the productivity of HIV/AIDS affected households in general, with a special focus on households headed by elderly women and those with a chronically ill household head. Rapid introduction of interventions with a "high food access to labour ratio" was recommended.

With numbers of orphan- and grandparent-headed households rising, "the whole gender and age bias of policy in general needs to be addressed," said Marsland, the regional food security adviser for Save the Children UK.

"There is a whole raft of issues to deal with: the ratio of labour to value would mean interventions with technologies that don't require a lot of labour but have high returns; agricultural extension services would need to target children and old women; issues of land tenure rights addressing the difficulties of access to land for widows and children, with children playing a more productive role, that needs to be integrated with the demands of schooling for example," he commented.

"The economic stress caused by HIV/AIDS can become so severe upon a household that engaging in, or continuing, income generation activities no longer becomes an option. At this point, the community and extended family's role becomes critical. In order to create a source of funds that are sustainable over the long term, communities will need to embark on an on-going resource mobilisation campaign to identify and mobilize internal resources first and then tap into external resources," noted the report.

Marsland said a welfare state model could be the kind of direction that government and development agencies would need to consider for vulnerable households, whose numbers will continue to increase as a result of the epidemic. "HIV/AIDS supports thinking about subsidies and reaching out to these people," he said, adding that the UN had taken the lead by mainstreaming HIV/AIDS through its humanitarian and development programmes in the region.

The SADC report, "Towards Identifying Impacts of HIV/AIDS on Food Insecurity in Southern Africa and Implications for Response: Findings from Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe", has been circulated widely among donors. They would need to help fund initiatives that run counter to the orthodox economic reforms followed by regional governments under their structural adjustment programmes.

"The question of whether or not HIV/AIDS, in its own right, warrants emergency programming even if the 2003 and subsequent harvests are good, needs to be placed squarely on the table. This is particularly important given the expected exponential growth in the disease over the next 10-12 years. The need for a 'paradigm shift' in the way that development and emergency programming is implemented in the region to tackle effectively this growth, is an issue that needs to be raised at all decision-making levels," the report concluded.