Tài liệu Food Security and Sustainable Development in Southern Africa docx

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Abstract
In the search for a Global Deal at the World Summit on
Sustainable Development, which sought to address global
economic relationships between the North and the South, a
crucial area of debate was food security. Despite impressive
developments around food growth in recent decades, resulting
in enough food to meet the basic needs of every person in the
world, not everyone is food-secure, as exemplified by the
acute food shortages in the southern African region during
2002 and 2003. There are many causes of food insecurity,
among them macro and micro issues, the roots of which are
essentially internal or indirectly caused by relationships with
other countries. Examples are political instability, poor
economic governance, poverty and a lack of sustainable
household income. The issue of HIV/AIDS has added another
critical dimension to the search for food security. Strategies for
enhancing income diversification and the income-generating
capacity of vulnerable groups in urban and rural areas should
be a major priority for both the developing and developed
world, coupled with genuine commitment to international
trade reforms.
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Food Security and Sustainable Development in
Southern Africa
Introduction
The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable
Development (WSSD) in August 2002 brought together global
leaders from government, civil society and business to review
the implementation of Agenda 21, launched at the United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED) held in Rio in 1992. The 2002 summit focused on
problems associated with increasing levels of poverty and
global inequality, highlighted the need to integrate the three
pillars of sustainable development (economic, social and
environmental) and to renew commitment to the Rio Prin-
ciples. It was also intended to facilitate agreement on actions
needed for the further implementation of Agenda 21, and to
‘find solutions to the current crises facing humanity today:
poverty, conflict, economic instability, the negative effects of
globalisation, the degradation of environmental resources and
emerging pandemics such as HIV/AIDS’ (Naidoo, 2002).
It has been widely acknowledged that there has been
limited success since the Rio conference in integrating the
social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainable
development and in creating a coherent and integrated
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Scott Drimie & Simphiwe Mini
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global-local governance framework to underpin them. In 2000,
eight years after UNCED, world leaders met at the United
Nations Millennium Summit and agreed upon the Millennium
Declaration, committing themselves to achieving a broad
range of time-bound, international development objectives
based on sustainable development principles. This was a step
further towards international recognition that practical and
time-bound measures are needed to advance sustainable
development and to target some of the greatest challenges to
humanity, namely, poverty and global inequality. In grappling
with this challenge, the South African government worked
towards a Global Deal for the WSSD which was intended to
constitute agreement, at the highest level, on actions needed
to combat the growing challenges facing sustainable develop-
ment, with a poverty eradication focus, as envisaged in the
Millennium Declaration.
The South African government believed that a global
response to these critical areas was needed as a basis for
launching a concrete and holistic global initiative for the
implementation of Agenda 21 and sustainable development.
The government thus developed a list of 22 priority areas for
international negotiations front-loaded by six core areas that
focused on basic needs and furthered sustainable develop-
ment through efficient use of resources. The six sectors were
water, energy, food security, health, education and tech-
nology. In terms of food security, the immediate focus was,
firstly, on the need to recognise that immediate action was
necessary to reverse the current maldistribution of food
throughout the world that denies people access and secondly,
on market access for agricultural products, particularly for
developing countries.
Food security therefore lay at the heart of South Africa’s
conceptualisation of sustainable development and poverty
reduction, as one of six core areas that required attention at
the WSSD. However, the issue of food security often becomes
submerged within the intractable challenges facing
development, as it raises issues that are linked to a host of
development concepts, particularly the fight against poverty.
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This had particular resonance during the WSSD in
Johannesburg as the United Nations’ World Food Programme
(WFP) and Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)
announced in June 2002, barely weeks before the Summit, that
12.8 million people in southern Africa were on the brink of
starvation.
This paper attempts to unravel some of the difficult debates
around food security. It provides an overview of the status quo
in thinking on food security at the time of the WSSD, outlines
the main issues, and draws a broad set of policy implications
from the discussion.
A brief overview of food security
The concept of food security helps to foster an integrated
approach to food and nutrition as it places stress on the
avoidance of under-nutrition or starvation as the fundamental
food policy goal. According to Frank Ellis (1992: 310), it
implies putting in place a set of instruments and mechanisms
that seek:
•To overcome existing long-term nutritional deprivation in
vulnerable groups of the population; and
•To avert short-term nutritional deprivation resulting from
adverse natural events or sudden changes in the capacity
of people to acquire enough food.
These issues were accepted by the 1996 World Food Summit
in Rome in recognition of the unacceptable dimensions of
problems of hunger and malnutrition – issues seen as
primarily associated with poverty and intensified by inter-
action with conflict and other sources of political instability.
Reflecting the importance of the issue of food security, the
concept has evolved, developed, multiplied and diversified in
recent years as a result of the diverse nature of the problem
(ODI, 1997).
In the 1970s, the concept was seen mainly as a ‘food
problem’, particularly of ensuring production of adequate food
supplies and maximising stability in their flow. This view led
Food Security and Sustainable Development in Southern Africa
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Scott Drimie & Simphiwe Mini
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to a focus on measures to reduce price variability and finance
the additional costs of exceptional imports at an international
level, and on self-sufficiency strategies at a national level. In
1983, the FAO expanded the concept to include a third aspect,
namely, securing access to available supplies for vulnerable
people, thus ensuring that attention was balanced between the
demand and supply sides of the food security equation. This
concept, powerfully influenced by the work of economist and
Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, resulted in the definition most
widely accepted and used as capturing the spirit of food
security:
[Food security] is access by all people at all times to enough food
for an active, healthy life. Its essential elements are the availability
of food and the ability to acquire it. Food insecurity, in turn, is the
lack of access to enough food (World Bank, 1986: 1).
This definition was further elaborated at the 1997 World Food
Summit as:
[Food] security, at the individual, household, national, regional
and global levels [is achieved] when all people, at all times, have
physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious
food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an
active and healthy life (ODI, 1997).
It has therefore been recognised at a global level, that the
world food problem is not synonymous with the problems of
world hunger and food insecurity. Achieving longer-term food
security is inextricably linked to overcoming other global
crises, such as population growth, unemployment, debt,
energy consumption, environmental and political security – all
problems with significant national and local components that
impact negatively on one another (ODI, 1997). Direct causes
of food insecurity include poverty, ill health, exclusion,
conflict and natural disasters.
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Food Security and Sustainable Development in Southern Africa
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Conceptualising food insecurity: the work of Sen
It has been largely through the influence of Sen that the
concept of food security has moved beyond debates around
‘national food availability’ to the ‘food entitlements of indi-
viduals and groups’. In other words, people starve because of
a food entitlement failure rather than because of a food
availability failure. Sen elaborated a series of proposals that
advanced traditional welfare economics, including the incorp-
oration of individual entitlements, functioning, opportunities,
capabilities, freedoms and rights into the conceptual found-
ations and technical apparatus of economics and social choice.
Sen’s ‘entitlements approach’ provides a framework for
analysing the relationship between rights, interpersonal
obligations and individual entitlement to things (ODI, 2001). A
person’s entitlement is a way of characterising an overall
command over things that takes note of all relevant rights and
obligations. This entitlement is the totality of things a person
can have by virtue of rights, the latter being characterised as
relationships that hold between distinct agents (between
persons, between the state and a person). Sen hypothesised
that, ‘[m]ost cases of starvation and famines across the world
arise not from people being deprived of things to which they
are entitled, but from people not being entitled, in the
prevailing legal system of institutional rights, to adequate
means of survival’ (1981, 1984 cited in ODI, 2001).
Sen distinguished four different types of entitlements that
individuals, or households may possess or acquire in a market
economy (cited in Ellis, 1992: 307):
•Trade-based entitlement: ownership of goods or resources
obtained by trading something a person or household
owns with another party;
• Production-based entitlement: ownership of output pro-
duced using personal or household resources, or using
resources willingly hired by others;
• Own-labour entitlement: ownership of personal labour
power, thus enabling the person or household to obtain
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Scott Drimie & Simphiwe Mini
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trade or production-based entitlement in exchange for
their own labour power; and
• Inheritance or transfer entitlement: ownership of goods or
resources bequeathed or freely given to the person or
household.
Sen’s empirical work suggests that in many famines, in which
millions of people have died, there is a range of variables,
other than simple agricultural productivity and aggregate food
supply, that can undermine a person’s entitlement to food; and
that there is a possibility of an asymmetry in the incidence of
starvation deaths among different population groups. In
essence, certain people in specific population groups starve
not only because of overall food shortages but also because
they are unable to trade their labour power or skills. Therefore
starvation occurs as a consequence of shifts in entitlements
resulting from exercising rights that are legitimate in legal
terms. These findings underpin the notion that insecure food
entitlements may not arise from market failure whereby a
person starves because of an inability to acquire sufficient
food through production or exchange.
Sen, therefore, made the fundamental point that develop-
ment objectives cannot be met by macro-level interventions
alone, as individual members of a nation have to be allowed
greater freedom to explore their full potential and worth. This
is a matter of improving human capability, which comes with
better governance, less corruption and better democratic
systems. Individuals should, therefore, have the opportunity to
participate in economic activity; and the economy must allow
them to access resources to develop their own welfare and
that of their families.
These theoretical underpinnings have influenced thinking
around famines and, indeed, the approach of such organ-
isations as the FAO, the WFP and other UN agencies. As the
Overseas Development Institute (ODI) has asserted, the
entitlements approach helped to shift the focus of inter-
national attention away from statistics describing per capita
calories and food supplies, towards statistics describing the
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differential ability of individuals, groups and classes to
command food in practice (2001). As a result, current
approaches to food security place an increased emphasis on
identifying the precise causes of the food vulnerability of
population groups.
1
This philosophy is reflected in the United
Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Develop-
ment Report (2000), which focuses on the inter-relationships
between human development and human rights, calling for a
framework for trade and investment that respects, protects and
promotes human rights and encourages a greater commitment
to human rights priorities in developing countries.
The outlook of global food insecurity
In 1996, the World Food Summit strengthened international
resolve to achieve global food security and intensify ongoing
efforts to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediate
view to reducing the number of undernourished people to
half their present level by no later than 2015 (DFID, 2002). At
the Millennium Summit in 2000, 191 countries redefined this
target into a Millennium Declaration Goal, which set out to
‘halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who
suffer from hunger’. Over the past three decades, world food
production has grown faster than population growth. The
remarkable growth in food availability achieved in developing
countries, more than halved the proportion of undernourished
from 37 to 17 per cent in 1997 to 1999. If available food could
be distributed evenly, each person would be assured of 2 700
calories a day.
However, despite these international commitments to
resolving food insecurity and the real achievements in global
food security, the gap between the aspiration of eradicating
hunger and the continuing reality of approximately 800
million, or more, undernourished people is stark. On a global
scale, progress is being made in reducing the absolute number
of hungry people in the world, but this is not happening fast
enough to achieve the Millennium Declaration Goal. World
Food Security and Sustainable Development in Southern Africa
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food is neither evenly distributed, nor fully consumed, among,
or within, countries. The FAO report on the State of Food
Insecurity in the World (1999b) indicated that the number of
undernourished people had been reduced to 790 million, that
is, 40 million less than the number estimated at the World
Food Summit in 1996. Whilst the total number of chronically
undernourished people in the developing world has fallen by
approximately 40 million in the last decade, the average rate
of decline has continued to be very slow, reaching six million
a year, compared with eight million reported in 1996 (FAO,
1996). Consequently, the annual reduction required to reach
the target by 2015 has grown from 20 to 22 million people per
year. Hence the gap between realised reductions and
reductions needed is widening. At the present rate it would
take 60 years to reach the estimated target.
During the period 1990 to 1996, a new flash point of hunger
and food insecurity has emerged. In sub-Saharan Africa, the
number of undernourished people doubled between 1969 and
1992 to 215 million people, and the proportion of the
population who were undernourished rose from 38 to 43 per
cent (FAO, 2001). Thus, while remarkable progress has been
made in some developing countries in reducing chronic
hunger and abject poverty, particularly in east and south Asia,
the situation of sub-Saharan Africa continued to deteriorate
through the 1990s (FAO, 1999a). The situation in this region is
similar to that of Asia in the early 1960s, with widespread
poverty and malnutrition, large national food deficits and
increasingly higher dependence on food imports and other
concessionary aid. However, the problem of food insecurity
varies in severity across the African continent. Although West
Africa has the largest population of any sub-region, it has the
lowest number of undernourished people. East Africa has
more than twice as many undernourished people (FAO, 2001).
The numbers in central and southern Africa are also propor-
tionately larger, although both have smaller total populations.
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