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African hunger

Last reviewed: 11-11-2009

THE NEVER-ENDING CRISIS


A Sudanese woman and her family wait in line at a feeding centre.<br> <b>REUTERS/Antony Njuguna</b>
A Sudanese woman and her family wait in line at a feeding centre.
REUTERS/Antony Njuguna
An estimated 265 million people do not have enough to eat in sub-Saharan Africa. The reasons for this are varied and complex. The causes of malnutrition can vary enormously from one country to the next. Even regions within individual countries can be subject to variations in politics, climate, society or economy that can affect the prevalence of hunger in quite different ways.

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in both development and emergency aid, the problem is getting worse and will deteriorate further if the host of underlying causes - ranging from climate change to HIV/AIDS - are not addressed.

Reuters AlertNet background briefings on hunger include:
  • The global food aid controversy
  • The reality of hunger
  • How does food aid work?
  • Covering food crises
  • Regional briefings for E. Africa and S. Africa

    MORE THAN AN EMERGENCY


    Africa is the developing region with the highest proportion - just under a third - of people suffering from chronic hunger.

    According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the number of undernourished people in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 169 million people in the 1990-1992 period to 265 million in 2009.

    The U.N. Children's Agency (UNICEF) says more than a quarter of children under the age of five are underweight, which represents a major risk factor underlying deaths on the continent. The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute estimates this amounts to some 2.9 million deaths annually.

    UNDERLYING CAUSES


    World Press Photo of the Year 2005 taken in Tahoua, Niger by <b>Reuters photographer Finbarr O'Reilly</b> in August 2005.
    World Press Photo of the Year 2005 taken in Tahoua, Niger by Reuters photographer Finbarr O'Reilly in August 2005.
    While individual food emergencies may be triggered by events such as a poor rainy season, the chronic vulnerability to hunger is caused by a wide range of underlying factors.

    Poverty

    One of the very few areas of consensus is that the dominant cause of hunger in Africa is poverty.

    In his seminal 1981 work "Poverty and Famines", the Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen wrote: "Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not characteristic of there not being enough food to eat. While the latter can be the cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes."

    Sen's thesis of "entitlement" showed how there is almost always enough food to supply the population, but those who are in abject poverty are unable to command the resources, that is the money, to purchase the food.

    More than twenty-five years later, his theories remain tragically relevant. An estimated 50 percent of people in Africa survive on less than $1.25 a day, according to the World Bank. The average life expectancy is only 52 years and few people have access to hospitals or doctors.

    Very low incomes force families to sell off assets such as animals and tools in order to make ends meet. Over time this reduces their ability to cope with shocks like the failure of a rainy season because they have nothing to fall back on in times of hardship.

    So a hunger crisis can develop even when markets are well stocked with food - because the people who need it most cannot afford to buy it. In short, being poor makes people poorer.

    Low agricultural productivity

    According to figures from the U.S.-based Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa, rural families account for 75 percent of the population in Africa and a large proportion of the hungry, malnourished and poor. In addition, rural small holder farms and firms account for over 80 percent of African agricultural exports and foreign exchange earnings from agriculture.

    Despite this, government investment in the sector continues to decline, along with production.

    British-based NGO FARM-Africa says that Africa has turned from being a food exporter to a net food importer in the past 30 years. Crop yields are no higher today than they were in 1980 and the continent's share of world agricultural trade has plummeted since 1965.

    The challenges facing Africa's agricultural sector include poor political and economic governance, inadequate funding for the agricultural sector, poor water resources management, and neglect of research and development.

    Foreign investment and donor relief are also lacking.

    According to Julie Howard, executive director of the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa, U.S. assistance to agriculture in Africa falls far below similar funding for health in Africa.

    HIV/AIDS

    Across the continent, but especially in the south, the spread of HIV/AIDS has irreparably damaged affected communities, compromising their capacity to cope and rendering them increasingly vulnerable to hazards and shocks.

    This is particularly the case when food is scarce, creating a new profile of vulnerability to destitution and hunger.

    According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), sub-Saharan Africa is home to two thirds of all people living with HIV.

    Southern Africa is the most affected region, where HIV prevalence rates have stabilised at high levels, accounting for more than a third of the world's HIV infections and AIDS deaths. Elsewhere HIV prevalence has stabilised or is declining at 5 percent or less.

    Whereas conventional famines tend to kill young children and the elderly, HIV/AIDS kills the young adults whose labour traditionally enabled communities to cope with drought and hunger.

    According to this hypothesis, known as New Variant Famine and pioneered by Alex de Waal, the burden of care for those sick with AIDS cripples families. Their livelihoods then collapse and the networks and coping strategies dissolve.

    "In short," de Waal writes, "HIV is imperilling the ability of African societies to reproduce themselves."

    Climate change

    Across the continent, climate change and rapid desertification - particularly the southward advance of the Sahara into Sahel regions - have stripped many communities of traditional farming and pasture land.

    Pastoralists need rain-fed grass to feed their cattle and the vast majority of farmers are dependent on rain-fed crops, so any disruption in the water supply can have a rapid and catastrophic effect. In large parts of Africa - especially the Sahel, east Africa and the Horn and southern Africa - rains have become unreliable and at times non-existent.

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a 2007 report that Africa will bear the brunt of global warming. The U.N. body predicted that an increase in greenhouse gas emissions will leave up to 1.8 million more people in Africa without sufficient clean water. Meanwhile, arid and semi-arid lands are likely to increase by up to eight per cent with profound consequences for agriculture and food productions.

    Among other predictions, the report said wheat may disappear from Africa by the 2080s, that the soya bean harvest in Egypt could drop by close to 30 per cent by 2050 under a worst case scenario and that maize yields could fall significantly in Southern Africa.

    Other man-made drivers of climate change include deforestation, which leads to desertification. The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) has said that logging is a central cause of drought in East Africa, given the role that dense vegetation such as forests plays in generating rainfall by pumping water held in soil into the air.

    Since independence in 1963, Kenya's forest cover has shrunk from 10 percent of its 582,650 square-kilometre (224,962-square-mile) territory to a mere 1.7 percent, altering rain and catchment patterns that are essential for the country's agrarian economy.

    Global food prices

    Soaring global food prices are affecting people's ability to feed their families. In 2007 and 2008, the global price of many basics including rice, wheat and maize shot up, triggering riots in many parts of Africa.

    Although global prices have eased since then, prices in developing countries remain high.

    Not surprisingly, the hardest hit are the poorest - especially the urban poor, who spend as much as 80 percent of their income on food.

    The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned the situation will worsen conflict in war zones.

    Countries most affected are those experiencing failed harvests forcing them to import large amounts of food. Many governments introduced food subsidies or export restrictions to counter rising costs, but some critics say these only exacerbated price rises on global markets.

    And the rising price of food, combined with fuel price hikes, also pushed the cost of food aid sky-high - just when it was needed most.

    The price rises were caused by a combination of increased demand from India and China, a rise in the use of biofuels produced from food crops, a spike in transport costs, and poor harvests.

    Armed conflict

    Widespread conflict and the proliferation of small arms have displaced millions of people across Africa. While the Sahel and southern Africa have been relatively free of conflict in recent years, the Horn of Africa is still wracked by armed violence.

    "Guns are at the heart of the problem," said the U.N.'s special adviser on internal displacement in 2006, Dennis McNamara. He added that the underlying causes of hunger, such as violence and political instability cannot be solved simply by handing out food.

    In Somalia, where 3.6 million people need assistance, there has been no central government since 1991, when the country descended into a protracted civil war.

    Aid agencies say that drought exacerbates conflict between nomadic groups in the area as they have to travel hundreds of kilometres in search of pasture.

    The number of weapons in the area makes these encounters increasingly lethal.

    U.N. officials say that lawlessness in areas of the Horn of Africa is making it harder to deliver food aid.


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    Prominent Western Sahara independence campaigner Aminatou Haidar smiles during her hunger strike at Guacimeta airport, on Lanzarote in Spain's Canary Islands December 1, 2009. Haidar has been on hunger strike since ...


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