This report is the third of a broader monitoring of food security and social welfare at community level by the Civic Monitoring Programme. Monthly monitoring will be complemented by quarterly monitoring of specific areas of social welfare.
Poverty and health
Community Assessment of Food Security and the Social Situation in Zimbabwe
Poverty and well being in Mozambique
This report from the International Food Policy Research Institute has very focused objectives. It seeks to present the methodology and results of the poverty analysis of the 2002-03 IAF as well as comparisons with the 1996-97 survey results. The results point to a substantially improved poverty picture relative to 1996-97. The national poverty headcount, defined as the share of the population living in poverty, declines to 54 percent, a 15 percentage point decline from the levels registered in 1996-97. Poverty reductions are more rapid in rural than in urban zones, narrowing considerably the differences in poverty between the two zones, though poverty levels remain higher in rural compared with urban zones.
SADC heads of state and government summit on agriculture and food security
The Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) on Agriculture and Food Security was held in Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania on 15 May 2004, and was chaired by His Excellency, Benjamin W. Mkapa, President of the United Republic of Tanzania. The Summit was held under the theme: Enhancing Agriculture and Food Security for Poverty Reduction in the SADC Region.
In his official opening statement, President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, the Chairperson of SADC underlined the need for the region to continue to fight together for economic liberation of Southern Africa, especially in finding a lasting solution to the pressing questions of food security and sustainable poverty reduction.
Further details: /newsletter/id/30512
** Food security and nutrition
Abstract of paper presented at the Equinet conference, Durban, 8-9 June 2004, by Mickey Chopra, David Sanders, School of Public Health University of Western Cape
The lack of household food security, and the subsequent poor nutrition, continues to blight the lives of millions of people in Southern Africa. Adequate food and nutrition is a basic right. The deprivation of this right has immense consequences for addressing inequities across the region. Poor nutritional status stunts educational development as well as increasing the risk of acquiring, and the severity of, infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS). The lack of household food security has led to increased vulnerability, especially of women, to diseases such as HIV.
Further details: /newsletter/id/30453
Food systems and security: helping the poor to cope
Food security can be defined as ‘having enough physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food’. Threats include the ability of people to deal with declining farm productivity or the loss of assets before or after harvest. Increasingly, the traditional rural focus of food security is shifting due to rapid urbanisation and growing urban slums. Approximately 800 million people in the developing world are undernourished and suffering from chronic hunger.
Growth, Inequality and Poverty
This paper raises some critical issues in the economic analysis of growth, inequality and poverty. It explores the relationship between growth and inequality, and looks into policies and institutions that are causally related to equitable growth. The author argues that in as much as progress has been made by economic literature, relatively little is known about how a society comes to acquire good policies and institutions, and exactly what is being offered when accepting the Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of income poverty by the year 2015.
The Chronic Poverty Report 2004-2005
Between 300 and 420 million people are trapped in chronic poverty. They experience deprivation over many years, often over their entire lives, and commonly pass poverty on to their children. Many chronically poor people die prematurely from health problems that are easily preventable. For them poverty is not simply about having a low income: it is about multidimensional deprivation – hunger, undernutrition, dirty drinking water, illiteracy, having no access to health services, social isolation and exploitation. Such deprivation and suffering exists in a world that has the knowledge and resources to eradicate it.
Improving the health of the world's poorest people
This bulletin, produced by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), highlights the poor-rich health divide that leaves more than 1 billion people worldwide excluded from both essential basic care and the benefits of advances in health and medical technology because of their extreme poverty. Key factors that contribute to these persistent health inequalities include lack of responsiveness by health systems to the needs of the poor; low quality of care; and the reality that public spending on health (justified on equity grounds) benefits non-poor groups more than the poor. In addition, few countries have taken measures to track progress in reducing socioeconomic disparities in health.
Malnutrition the cause of disease burden
Improving nutrition would have broad and generally non-specific (or multipurpose) benefits in reducing the effects of infectious diseases. Non-specific public health measures tend to be underestimated in their impact, as the benefits are spread among so many conditions. The estimates in this paper try to capture this broad effect, using underweight (itself a non-specific measure) as an indicator of inadequate nutritional status, in part at least caused by inadequate diet. The results reinforce the case that SubSaharan Africa and Asia (especially South Asia) have the greatest needs. The effects of malnutrition, particularly as a risk factor, are very extensive, implying large potential benefits to health from addressing malnutrition. More attention to public nutrition could be the most effective investment in preventing ill-health and premature mortality throughout much of the developing world.
Measuring growth in a poor world
The extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years. It is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption, without any increase in measured inequality. Current statistical procedures in poor countries understate the rate of global poverty reduction, and overstate growth in the world, argues this research paper.