Background

Food security issues and debates
Most donor efforts during 2001-03 focussed on dealing with the humanitarian crisis, as seen in the WFP-co-ordinated EMOP and the US-funded CSAFE operations that are mainly concerned with distributing additional food supplies.

In contrast to the 1991/92 drought, when SADC through SADC-FANR played a key role in co-ordinating the response to that shock, the problems in 2001-03 were largely met by national governments and the international donors, both governmental and non-governmental. The uncertainties and dislocations caused by the current re-structuring and centralisation of SADC have made it difficult for SADC to take the lead.

There is widespread dismay at the depth and extent of food insecurity provoked by the 2001/02 climatic events that were in most parts of the region less severe than that of 1991/92, both meteorologically and in the extent of crop losses. There are several competing potential explanations for this, including:

• Specific policy mistakes - for example, rapid land redistribution, sales of strategic grain reserves, failures of governance in general, and declining capacity of state agencies hit by reduced budgets and loss of staff to emigration and the HIV/AIDS pandemic;
  
• Economic slowdown and macroeconomic problems that have meant urban and industrial jobs have not been created in step with the growth of the workforce, leading to unemployment and declining real wages;
  
• Economic liberalisation in countries where the private sector has not been well enough developed to take over all the functions previously carried out by the state, above all in rural areas;
  
• The cumulative impacts of environmental decline, climate change and failures to develop and disseminate agricultural techniques appropriate to the level of climatic variability in sub-humid and semi-arid lands;
  
• The HIV/AIDS pandemic undercutting both agricultural production and local coping systems.

There is a need to think about what has gone wrong, the answer to which will vary between countries, and from this to identify policy options for the medium and long terms to ensure that the countries and the region are more food secure and that future climatic shocks do not again place millions of people at risk of hunger and destitution.

During 2001-03 attention was primarily directed to conventional humanitarian assistance in the form of food aid. It includes an impressive effort in vulnerability assessment at national and regional levels. The concerted efforts of agencies - including WFP, UNDP, FAO, UNICEF, and FEWSNET, supported by funding from other donors such as DFID, USAID and the EU - assisted by some NGOS, including SCFUK and CARE - produced a system whereby estimates of vulnerability are produced three or four times a year.

Originally vulnerability assessments were based on national food balance sheets using data on stocks, trade, and forecasts of production of the main food staples, above all cereals. Subsequently the assessments took into consideration access to food, and looked at vulnerability of households in specific circumstances and districts. In several countries, including Mozambique and Zimbabwe, food economy zones have been identified, mapped, and characterised. Within each zone, concepts from livelihoods and the household economy approaches have been applied to identify those households most susceptible to shocks to the food economy.

The latest refinement of the vulnerability assessments reflects a widespread debate across the region: that of the relative roles of food poverty and disease in the current crisis. On the one hand, the emergency has been defined primarily as one of food production, triggered by crop failures arising from unfavourable climatic events. Hence most of the donor efforts, and those of national governments, focus on the import of additional grain. On the other hand, nutritional assessments show that rates of global acute malnutrition, even in the worst hit areas, have remained below internationally defined crisis levels. But levels of morbidity are unduly high. Hence the current problem may be closely linked to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Hence, on the prompting of UNICEF and WHO, the round of vulnerability assessments for December 2002 incorporated health and nutrition data.

If the 2001-03 crisis was one where HIV/AIDS was a major factor, then the implications are grim: it will not be resolved by temporary interventions in the food economy and good harvests. The lurking fear for government and donors is that levels of spending similar to the 2001-03 emergency levels may be necessary for years to come.

The emerging lessons from the Forum indicate the 2001-03 "crisis" was not a temporary departure from an otherwise positive evelopment trajectory for the people of Southern Africa: even in non-crisis years, recent livelihoods analysis is now indicating some 8 million people in the region are vulnerable to food insecurity for all or part of the year. So there cannot be a return to "business as usual" based on the economic development models used by governments and donors in the region over the last two decades. There is a set of systemic factors keeping the countries of Southern Africa in or on the edge of economic crisis: the failure of market liberalisation as originally perceived; the spread of HIV/AIDS; weaknesses in accountability and governance; and weaknesses in regional integration and coordination. The Forum process has highlighted five areas where changes are urgently required.

• Influence of politics on policy process - due to the existence, in this era of political liberalisation and aided by the nature of the aid relationship, of nation states in between patronage and bureaucracy, in between presidentialism and liberal democracy. This has resulted in the "taming" of structural adjustment and the partial reform syndrome, where state intervention continues in politically important sectors. The only real solution will be transforming the aid relationship to support the development of democratic accountability. At a technical level, policies need to be designed on the basis of hard evidence rather than to meet short term political objectives of governments and donors. This requires better feeding of existing evidence and analysis into the policy process, which in itself depends on stronger links between different actors with a legitimate interest in policy development: civil society, the media, researchers, as well as bureaucrats and politicians.
• Poor policy implementation - which is often overshadowed by questions of policy content. This is in part due to the influence of politics on the policy process at national and local levels, but also due to long-standing weak capacity now exacerbated by HIV/AIDS. There is a need to find means of delivering economic and social services that have minimal requirements for state bureaucracy and apparatus, i.e. using a much wider range of actors including NGOs, CBOs and the private sector at local and national level.
• Errors in the assumptions underpinning the `first-round' economic liberalisation strategies designed by the IFIs in the late 1980s and partially implemented in the region since then. These significantly under-estimated the impediments caused by failures in economic coordination in input, output, finance and credit markets - which have meant the risks facing buyers and sellers are so great that many are unwilling to enter the marketplace and become the anticipated deep, broad private sector underpinning economic activity in the region. Allowing agriculture to play its role as a driver of pro-poor economic growth in the region, and rural non-farm activities to play their critical role in supporting this growth, requires more stable and consistent macro-economic policies and incentives to encourage a greater range of actors (NGOs, CBOs, private sector) to mediate and support input, output, finance and credit markets. Increased integration and coordination in agricultural markets at regional level as well as national level must be an important component - Southern Africa may never be a major player in the international trading arena, but much more could be done to strengthen food security through building on the complementarity in food production and consumption patterns within the region.
• In the short to medium term, until self-sustaining growth takes hold, economic strategies will need to include market intervention by various means to stabilise food availability and prices. New models for grain reserves and food price stabilisation through subsidising producer and consumer prices, subsidising inputs, etc are urgently required. The agricultural sector may need to be viewed as a net recipient of government revenue over the short-medium term. Southern Africa has lost valuable time while the international community has argued about the importance of agriculture in pro-poor economic growth; as this is once again widely accepted, it is urgent to get down to the detail of how best to support the different components of the agricultural sector to enable it to maximise its contribution.
• Short-medium term economic strategies will also need to provide a range of safety nets more appropriate to the needs and contexts of different categories of vulnerable people, including the increasing proportion affected by HIV/AIDS - and this crisis has by no means peaked in the region.

Each of these areas of action is vital: none can be postponed. This will require the maintenance or expansion of aid flows to the region; strict prioritisation of public expenditure towards these areas; and a willingness to review the current development framework, particularly opportune as mid-term PRSP reviews are due in a number of countries in the region, to ensure that design and delivery genuinely addresses these priorities.