This book analyses interactions between food insecurity, vulnerability and the right to food. The significance of a human rights approach, and the way in which it translates to gender considerations, with links to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, agricultural productivity and the environment, adds a new dimension to the problem of world hunger. By exploring these approaches to hunger this volume shifts away from research on macro food availability to more composite dimensions cutting across economics, sociology, law and politics. It includes a chapter on Food Security in the SADC Region: An Assessment of National Trade Strategy in the Context of the 2001-03 Food Crisis by A.Charman & J.Hodge and on Gender, HIV/AIDS and Rural Livelihoods: Micro-Level Investigations in Three African Countries by J.Curry, E.Wiegers, A.Garbero, S.Stokes & J.Hourihan.
Poverty and health
The current global food crisis will impact most in the world’s poorest countries civil society leaders said in Accra on the opening day of UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The meeting, organised with the collaboration of UNCTAD and the UN’s Office of the High Representative for LDCs, LLDCs and SIDS (UN-OHRILLS), was addressing the continued vulnerability of LDCs. Hosted by Ghana, the UNCTAD XII conference entitled “Making Globalisation Work for Development” is seeking to identify opportunities of globalisation for developing countries. However as the civil society meeting heard current international policies are not addressing the systemic problems facing LDCs.
This special issue explores how the forces of globalisation influence poverty; describes and discusses the main transmission channels and mechanisms; and analyses the impact of globalisation on Africa through six case studies.
Microfinance has been recognised, globally, as a viable and sustainable tool for poverty reduction and economic development through improving income generating activities and employment creation. Despite well documented evidence of the positive impact of promoting access to finance to under-served segments of the community, many poor people in the Africa, particularly in Southern African Development Community (SADC), still remain excluded from the mainstream financial system. Microfinance programmes are reported to stimulate the growth of the micro-enterprises and the SME sectors, assist in the formalization of the informal sector and integrate that sector into the mainstream economy, thus contributing to socio-economic development and to poverty reduction.
Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) and Poverty Impact Assessment (PIA) are recently developed tools for analysing the distributional impact of policies, programmes and projects on the well-being of the population, with particular focus on the poor and vulnerable. Both approaches provide a comprehensive framework for analysis while drawing on a wide range of well-established approaches and tools covering economic, social, political and institutional issues. The International Poverty Centre (IPC) is administering a joint United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) / World Bank Project on PSIA. The overall objective is to promote capacities in developing countries for analytical work on the impact of national policies and to use these results to influence poverty reduction strategies. This involves adjusting policy design in light of the impact of policies on poor women and men, and providing evidence to inform national policy dialogue.
This article analyses the effectiveness of the investment that the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced - a joint ‘Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa’ (AGRA). The authors argue that, based on the first Green Revolution experience, this initiative will not succeed because: 1. The Green Revolution actually deepens the divide between rich and poor farmers; 2. Over time, Green Revolution technologies degrade tropical agro-ecosystems and increase environmental risk; 3. The Green Revolution leads to the loss of agro-biodiversity; 4. Hunger is not primarily due to a lack of food, but rather because the hungry are too poor to buy the food that is available; 5. Without addressing structural inequities in the market and political systems, approaches relying on high input technologies fail; 6. The private sector alone will not solve the problems; 7. Genetic engineering (GE) will make Sub-Saharan smallholder systems more environmentally vulnerable; 8. GE crops into smallholder agriculture will likely lead to farmer indebtedness; 9. The assertion that “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) ignores the many successful agro-ecological and non-corporate approaches to agricultural development; 10. AGRA’s “alliance” does not allow peasant farmers to be the principal actors in agricultural improvement. The authors conclude that if the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations want to end hunger and poverty in rural Africa, then they should invest in the service of the struggle by peasant and farmer organisations and their allies to truly achieve food sovereignty.
Zimbabwe will be the first country in Southern Africa to adopt a new food security analysis tool, developed in Somalia in 2004. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Framework (IPC) categorises the severity of a situation using a five-phase scale ranging from 'generally food secure' to 'famine/humanitarian catastrophe', based on comprehensive data on the impact of a crisis on food security and nutrition.
With increasing urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa and poor economic performance, the growth of slums is unavoidable. About 71% of urban residents in Kenya live in slums. Recent research shows that the urban poor fare worse than their rural counterparts on most health indicators, yet much about the health of the urban poor remains unknown. This study aims to quantify the burden of mortality of the residents in two Nairobi slums, using a Burden of Disease approach and data generated from a Demographic Surveillance System. Slum residents in Nairobi have a high mortality burden from preventable and treatable conditions. It is necessary to focus on these vulnerable populations since their health outcomes are comparable to or even worse than the health outcomes of rural dwellers who are often the focus of most interventions.
This paper describes changes over the past 15-20 years in non-income measures of wellbeing—education and health—in Africa. Results indicate that in the area of health, little progress is being made in terms of reducing pre-school age stunting, a clear manifestation of poor overall health. Likewise, our health inequality measure showed that while there were a few instances of reduced inequality along this dimension, there was, on balance, little evidence of success in improving equality of outcomes. Similar results were found in our examination of underweight women as an indicator of general current health status of adults. The overall picture gives little cause for complacency or optimism that Africa has reaped, or will soon reap the potential benefits of the process of globalisation.
From the vantage point of a rural district in northern Mozambique, the development efforts by government and donors are visible through the enhanced capacity of the local administration and investments in education and health, but not where it really matters for poor people: employment creation and reasonable returns from their agricultural production, which currently are adversely affected by an absent or exploitative private sector. The very poorest are marginalised or excluded from social relationships with the extended family, traditional institutions as well as the state, underlining the need to give special attention to the chronically poor and destitute in rural areas.