Food Security Policy in Africa Between Disaster Relief and Structural Adjustment

Reflections on the Conception and Effectiveness of Policies; the case of Tanzania

Gabriele Geier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135207694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

According to the FAO, one person in three in sub-Saharan Africa suffers from malnutrition, and one in seven is in danger of dying. Most African countries no longer seem capable of ensuring that their people have access to sufficient food. Given the failure of past efforts the objectives of food security policies and their effectiveness have to be reconsidered. This book shows that the debate on food security policies has changed with the passage of time. The entitlement debate triggered by A. Sen had a major influence on this change but, the bearing of socio-economic structures on the food security of African households and their individual members are still not fully recognised.

Part I Trend in the International Debate on Food Security

The right of every human being to a life without hunger is undisputed internationally and assured in the UN Charter of Human Rights (Seara-Vasquez no year, p. 184; FAO no year; Eide / Eide 1988, pp. 132–140; United Nations 1978). Numerous national and international resolutions confirm this human right and call for action to eliminate malnutrition and hunger. Unambiguous and undisputed though the overriding objective of eliminating hunger and malnutrition would appear to be, the analyses and assessments of the causes of food insecurity and of the policies and instruments needed to achieve this goal differ.

The concept of food security has changed in the past. Apart from the fact that, despite the many and varied efforts that have been made, hunger and malnutrition persist or are even on the increase in many countries, thus revealing the failure of past policies, this change was particularly influenced by three interdependent factors: the perception of the food problem, the dominant development paradigm and the interests of national governments and international donors.

Streeten rightly points out that there has never been a single development paradigm and that the dominant paradigms have always been simultaneously criticized and modified. Yet there have always been dominant opinions which have influenced development policy and cooperation (Streeten 1981, pp. 100–114). Much the same is true of the debate on food security, although rather than one paradigm being completely supplanted by another, approaches and points of main emphasis have changed with the passage of time and new, relevant aspects have been added.⁹

1 Food Insecurity as a National Supply Problem

Until the mid-1980s food security was more or less equated with a domestic supply of food sufficient to meet domestic requirements. To allow for distribution inequalities and losses, a 10% margin was often added when the required food supply was calculated. Closing the food gap calculated in this way by taking measures to increase supply was seen as the primary objective. The priorities as regards the policies and instruments needed to achieve this objective have changed over the years in line with the general debate on development policy, albeit with something of a time lag.

1.1 Trade and Aid: Closing the Domestic Food Gap with Imports

In the 1950s and 1960s the international debate on food security focused primarily on the transfer of food: trade and aid were to close any food gaps that might occur in the developing countries.

In this way growth-oriented development strategies that concentrated on fostering domestic industries were to be supported. Development was equated primarily with industrial growth. Domestic agriculture was systematically neglected. These modernization strategies allotted it the task of providing the capital needed for industrialization and earning indispensable foreign exchange by exporting cash crops. The thesis postulated by Fei and Ranis that the marginal productivity of labour in the agricultural sector is almost zero (Fei / Ranis 1964) resulted in a grave underestimation of the effects that the migration of labour from the agricultural to the non-agricultural sector has on agricultural production. However, rising food imports appeared to relieve agriculture of its important task of supplying cheap food and so maintaining low wages in the newly emerging industries.¹⁰

It was not considered necessary to formulate national food security policies as such, since a continuing growth process – once it had been initiated – would raise everyone’s standard of living and so improve the supply of necessary food to the whole population. The food problem was essentially seen – except when disasters occurred – as a problem of supplying the growing urban population.

While the concept of aid followed on from the idea of closing temporary gaps and was thus intended to help overcome any bottlenecks (foreign exchange, food) arising during industrial development, trade was assigned the task of not only closing temporary gaps but also enabling long-term optimal specialization patterns to emerge and bringing about a sustained increase in the supply of food in developing countries.

It was no accident that this period coincided with growing food surpluses, initially in the USA and then in the EC too. Donors were very interested in disposing of their surpluses. Supplies of food aid to developing countries during the Cold War could, moreover, be used as further evidence of the superiority of the western, market-oriented system.¹¹

The conclusion of the International Wheat Agreement – consisting of the Grain Trade Agreement and the Food Aid Convention (FAC) – in 1967 is an indication of this development. The first FAC was one outcome of the complex negotiations on agricultural trade during the GATT Kennedy Round from 1964 to 1967 (Schuhmacher 1981). For the first time the Food Aid Convention stipulated that the donor community would supply a minimum annual quantity of cereals (4.226 million tonnes) in food aid to developing countries, although normal trade flows were not to be disrupted, i.e. food aid was to supplement, not replace commercial trade.¹² The FAC was extended several times, further objectives were added, and the aid guidelines were also modified to take account of development policy objectives.¹³ In the current, 1986 convention the signatories¹⁴ undertake to supply a minimum annual quantity of 7.617 million tonnes of grain as food aid or to provide the cash equivalent for the purchase of grain.

To minimize unforeseen fluctuations of supply and to secure sufficient food for the population, even in poor years, efforts were also made, mainly with the help of the FAO, to establish national early-warning and information systems to monitor production trends and to identify and announce domestic shortages well in advance.

1.2 Growth of Domestic Food Production: Food Self-sufficiency

The 1970s saw the emergence of an international consensus that the food problem could be solved only if national policies were pursued with the explicit aim of increasing food security. Initially, however, the gauge of food security – the supply of food available domestically – was not changed. The food problem also continued to be perceived as one faced primarily by the urban population. Yet an adequate supply of food was to be ensured not by food imports but by domestic food production, which had hitherto been neglected, or an increase in the supply of local produce to the urban market.

The debate was influenced by the following factors:

– the dependency school, and the debate it triggered on the delinking of the developing countries from the world economy, and the search for an independent approach to development: although the policy recommended was usually import-substituting industrialization rather than the promotion of agricultural development, the goal of greater national political and economic independence was incompatible with growing dependence on food imports. Hence the call for independent food supplies. Furthermore, growing criticism was levelled at allocation criteria and the effects of food aid. The use of wheat as a political weapon made dependence on grain imports seem unacceptable (Wallensteen 1976, pp. 277–298));

– the optimism about rapid industrial development and the effectiveness of the trickle-down mechanism could no longer be sustained. Neither integration into the world market based on comparative advantages nor de-linking geared to rapid industrialization promised a substantial improvement in the lives of the majority of the people in developing countries. Active promotion of agriculture seemed necessary if foreign exchange and/or food shortages were to be avoided;

– the increasing scarcity of foreign exchange and the balance-of-payments problems faced by many developing countries – while domestic food shortages grew – restricted the scope for commercial imports. In addition, the world food crisis from 1972 to 1974 made it abundantly clear that international aid measures on their own were totally inadequate;¹⁵

– at the same time, successes achieved in production during the Green Revolution provided a new ray of hope that there was a way for developing countries to attain independent food security.¹⁶

That the developing countries were right to try to become self-sufficient in food seemed, moreover, to be confirmed by the policy of the industrialized countries. Even industrialized countries which were highly integrated into the world market and had diversified trade relations and thus a relatively stable supply of foreign exchange had at least partly de-linked their national agricultural and food markets from the world market through government intervention in various forms (e.g. guaranteed selling prices, variable levies and export refunds in the EC) and become more than self-sufficient in important foodstuffs.¹⁷

As early as 1974 the call therefore went out at the World Food Conference for a new international approach in response to the continuing food crisis (Falcon et al., 1987, pp. 15–25). It was argued that increasing domestic food production, particularly in developing countries suffering from food shortages, would eliminate famine and malnutrition within a decade and ensure that everyone had enough to eat. There was considerable optimism about the availability of production methods and techniques for achieving this objective. National efforts were to be complemented by the creation of international grain reserves. On the recommendation of the World Food Conference the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Council (WFC) were also established.

This new area of international effort was reflected in the concept of national food strategies proposed by the World Food Council in 1979.¹⁸ The emphasis is on policies and programmes aimed at growth of domestic food production, especially as it is postulated that “increasing self-sufficiency in food is in itself an important focus of development” (World Food Council 1982, p. 15). Although the World Food Council’s concept also stresses the need for more jobs and higher incomes in order to increase demand for food backed by purchasing power, the intention being to broaden the debate to include aspects of demand as well as supply, there is little evidence of this in the formulation and implementation of food strategies in Africa.¹⁹

The EC, a major international donor of aid to African countries, seized on the World Food Council’s concept²⁰ and helped to design and implement food strategies in African countries.²¹ The main aim of these food strategies was aptly summarized by Pisani:

“The idea of a food strategy is to get the peasant to produce. … it does suggest that the recipient countries have policies on prices, on the spreading of techniques, on seed and fertilizer and on supplying the rural areas in such a way as to give the peasant farmers sound reasons to produce.” (Pisani 1984, p. 67)

Consequently, the emphasis was placed on policies designed to restructure the grain market and increase food production. Demand and nutrition aspects attracted as little attention as the central role played by women in the production, processing and preparation of food in many developing countries.²²

It should be noted that the EC’s food supplies became an important source of funds for measures taken under food strategies and that in the 1980s food aid gained in importance over other EC development cooperation programmes and instruments.²³ Most EC food aid has been used to offset structural grain shortages and sold in the market at local prices. The proceeds of such sales (counterpart funds) made a major contribution to the financing of the restructuring of Mali’s grain market, for example. Food aid provided by other donors was also used either directly or indirectly – through the generation of counterpart funds – to establish national strategic grain reserves, which were to be used to compensate for price fluctuations and to restructure and stabilize the market. Support was also given to the establishment of emergency food reserves to enable governments to supply food to people affected by unforeseen emergencies as soon as they occurred and to tide them over until other measures, including external aid, took effect.²⁴

2 Food Insecurity as an Access Problem

Prompted by Sen’s entitlement debate, the international organizations’ conception of food security underwent a significant change in the mid-1980s. By analysing the causes of famine, especially in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and the Sahel, Sen showed that an adequate supply of food per capita, though necessary, is by no means enough to eliminate food insecurity or famine (Sen 1981). On the contrary, Sen concluded, the “Malthusian optimism” dominant in policy (Sen 1986, p. 6), i.e. the linking of food security to per capita food supply and thus the failure to take measures to increase food security as long as supply continues to rise, or at least does not fall, has contributed to growing malnutrition among certain population groups. Given the significance of the entitlement approach, the basic idea is briefly described in the following.²⁵

2.1 Entitlement Approach: the Right to Food

“The entitlement approach to starvation and famines concentrates on the ability of people to command food through the legal means available in the society, including the use of production possibilities, trade opportunities, entitlements vis-a-vis the state, and other methods of acquiring food.”²⁶

The analysis thus begins with the legal means of acquiring food that exist in the society concerned.²⁷ Entitlement depends both on the political, economic and social conditions in that society and on the position which the individual occupies in it. He or she will go hungry if his or her entitlement does not enable him or her to obtain a bundle of goods that includes sufficient food,²⁸ even though there is enough food in the society in terms of per capita supply.

In a market economy the ability to obtain various bundles of commodities i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Problem and the Essential Features of the Study
• Part I Trend in the International Debate on Food Security
• Part II Reflections on the Effectiveness of Policies in Relation to Various Aspects of Food Security
• Part III Food Security and Policy Interventions - the Case of Tanzania
• Part IV Development of Food Security in a Region Remote from Important Markets: Case Studies in Rukwa Region
• Part V Conclusions for the Conception of Food Security Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Notes
• Annex
• Bibliography