Food security and human development

The SADC subregion is said to be chronically food insecure for the most part. This chron-ic food insecurity is the result of structural, institutional and polchron-icy problems as well as climate change challenges. According to SADC (2009), the structural challenges are asso-ciated with the underlying features of the subregional economy, including external factors such as climate change. On the other hand, institutional challenges include weak or miss-ing institutions in the subregional economy to support food production and food security.

Finally, but not least, policy issues have to do with weaknesses in food, agricultural and related policies, including trade, investment and subregional cooperation policies. A look at some of these factors is useful for understanding the human development challenge as it relates to food security in the SADC subregion.

Some of the structural factors responsible for food insecurity, malnutrition and limited human development include:

Poverty and vulnerability: the case of poverty, inequality and vulnerability was made earlier. It showed that poverty levels in the SADC subregion are relatively high. Poverty is both a cause and a consequence of the prevalence of low incomes, high and increasing unemployment levels and high levels of human deprivation. In addition, poverty in the subregion has a significant gender dimension with women making up the majority of the poor. Households headed by women bear the brunt of poverty, compared to those headed by men. Child or orphaned households are also highly vulnerable groups, as they are high-ly susceptible to poverty and hunger. The rural areas of SADC have a disproportionatehigh-ly higher concentration of the poor than the urban areas. Poverty is a key factor in creating food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition, because the poor cannot afford agricultural inputs and they cannot participate effectively in production. Further, they lack the means to purchase food when it is available on the market. Poverty-reduction efforts will have to take on strategies for curtailing food insecurity if poverty reduction is to succeed.

Low agricultural productivity: as was elaborated earlier, labour and total factor tivity in the agriculture sector is the lowest among all sectors in SADC. And the produc-tivity of SADC’s agriculture is among the lowest in the world (APP, 2011). For instance, the average yield of the main staple maize grown by smallholder farmers in the SADC subregion ranges from 1.0 to 2.0 tons/hectare (ha), compared to the maize grown in the commercial sector in South Africa which has the highest average yields, ranging be-tween 4.0 and 5.0 tons/ha. On the other hand, yields in developed countries are much higher, ranging between 8.0 and 10.0 tons/ha on average. It is therefore vital to capacitate smallholder farmers through improved access to essential agricultural inputs if the SADC subregion is to attain the high levels of yield necessary for poverty reduction and achiev-ing food security. Low agricultural productivity in the SADC subregion poses a major threat to food security, nutrition and poverty alleviation. The constraints to agriculture productivity and the resulting food security challenges in SADC are partly to do with the HIV/AIDS crisis, which has adversely affected both the large- and small-scale agricultural sub-sectors. The SADC paper on food security (SADC, 2009) has recommended that member States should be urged to: promote labour-saving technologies at all levels; im-prove knowledge of prevention and transmission of HIV; strengthen rural institutions and capacity-building; promote gender equality in agriculture; improve nutrition and nutri-tion educanutri-tion; strengthen social and economic safety nets; and mainstream HIV/AIDS in agricultural policies.

Unbalanced economic development: the causes and consequences of urbanisation – as a form of spatially unbalanced economic development – were illustrated earlier. According to SADC (SADC, 2009) another important form of unbalanced economic development relates to the nexus between domestic production and trade. The export trade of SADC member States is reportedly dominated by primary commodities sold abroad as raw ma-terials. This means these goods have little or no value added. On the other hand, imports are dominated by intermediate, finished and capital goods. This places the subregion in a vulnerable position, with unmitigated exposure to natural and economic external shocks and concomitantly, with potentially highly adverse poverty and food insecurity effect.

The subregion must therefore diversify its export products (to include higher value-added products) and export destinations. APP (2011) also notes the role of disadvantageous trade rules and disciplines in the multilateral trading system, which needs serious consideration.

Global food crisis: The source of the global food crisis was the experience of food shortages and subsequent food price increases during 2007/2008 and 2010/2011. This is largely the reason why SSA recorded the lowest improvements on the Global Hunger Index during 2000-2011. These food crises deeply affected the small countries that depended on food imports. The subsequent trade insulation by larger countries, which caused increases and volatility in international prices, made domestic prices in these small import-dependent countries larger than they would have otherwise been (FAO, 2011). For the SADC subre-gion, apart from by the global index, the following main categories are seen;

• Hunger levels in DRC were classified as “extremely alarming”

• Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar –“alarming”

• Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho and Malawi–“serious”,

• South Africa and Mauritius in the “moderate” category (IFPRI, 2011).and On a brighter note, Angola and Mozambique were among the seven countries in the world that showed the largest improvements on the global hunger index during 1990-2011.

Going forward the United Nations projects that the world population will increase to 9 billion inhabitants by 2050 and this will add more pressure on global food supply. With the prices of many staples having reached record levels in 2008, security in food and nutrition are already among SADC’s greatest challenges. However, the intensity of these challenges is likely to increase in the future. To make matters worse, the SADC subregion’s high dependence on food imports and food aid is likely to exacerbate the food insecurity challenges further. Indeed, IFPRI (2011) projects that high and volatile food prices are likely to continue mainly because of stronger linkages between agricultural and energy markets, as well as increased frequency of weather shocks. When prices fluctuate substan-tially, even if they are tolerable on average, the short-term shocks make both smallholder farmers and poor consumers vulnerable to long-term poverty traps. In addition, small-holder farmers find it difficult to invest when price changes are unpredictable.

The emerging risks of acute chronic food shortages for the SADC subregion are likely to impact disproportionately more on the poor. To mitigate these risks, SADC will have to increase the level and quality of investments in agriculture towards raising productivity and inclusive sectoral growth. Investments in pro-poor public health, education, busi-ness services, infrastructure, human capacity, technology and organized markets will be a necessity for building institutions and achieving people-centred economic growth and en-vironmental sustainability. Indeed, as argued by both APP (2011) and UNDP (2010), the fact that the number of Africans suffering from hunger had already been on the increase well before prices spiked suggested that chronic and structural problems, rather than mere price fluctuations, continue to underlie much of the continent’s food insecurity. The struc-tural changes that have already been considered above, and elsewhere in this report, will need to be addressed if SADC food security is to become stable and sustainable.

Climate change: As was noted earlier, climate change has caused almost permanent changes in normal weather patterns. As a result, the African region at large has expe-rienced frequent episodes of floods, droughts, temperature spikes and dips, and highly

seasonal and erratic rainfall patterns, leading to variable flows in rivers. These events have sometimes all happened even within the same year. Thus, during the past 20 years or so, food production has been adversely affected by droughts and floods in various parts of the SADC subregion. Threats to adequate food production have also stemmed from the asso-ciated adverse weather patterns, which have often caused deteriorations in crop yields and even complete failures, creating food shortages. The human and economic-development costs of this have been significant. The challenges associated with the droughts, floods and erratic rain patterns are made worse by high dependency on rain-fed agricultural produc-tion, and concentration on the production of low-value crops. This has been compounded by the inadequacy of water-control systems and water-conservation measures, and the lack of infrastructure to enhance the productivity and competitiveness of farmers in the sub-region. Many observers anticipate that climate change with all its vagaries will continue well into the future. As part of the way forward, it is important for SADC to promote sustainable food production that is responsive to the climate-change situation now fac-ing the subregion. Key strategies will include: the application of sound water-source and water-course management systems (including policies, legal regulations and institutions);

the promotion of appropriate irrigation technologies; and efficient water use.

6.4 Conclusions and recommendations

A summary of the chapter findings is given below:

• Natural-resource depletion is high but especially so in a few SADC countries (three) that largely depend on extractive industries for their economic growth and natural-resource rents. If unchecked, this is likely to result in an unsustainable environment, which could cause an adverse vicious cycle of reduced growth in the respective economies and hinder progress in human development.

• A huge proportion of the subregion’s population depend on agriculture but employ unsophisticated agricultural practices. The environmental burden of these practices compromises environmental sustainability and achievement of the MDG targets related to environmental sustainability. There is urgent need to intensify subregional efforts to address issues of environmental sustainability. The subregional efforts will have to be underpinned by well-thought-out, home-grown national policies, strategies and actions.

• The subregion’s land-are under forest declined by about 8 percentage points (20 per cent) between 1990 and 2010. If this decline is not checked, the forests in SADC will have declined to 16 per cent of the total land area by 2050. This trend is clearly environmentally unsustainable and places the current and next generation in imminent danger of desertification and bio-diversity losses.

• Over the period 1990-2011, a majority of countries in the subregion have increasingly become more urbanised. The SADC subregion will therefore

have to formulate and apply subregional and national policies and actions for fostering more rational and environmentally friendly patterns of human settlement. Efforts to reduce and even reverse rural-to-urban migration trends will have to be intensified. This be could achieved through positive discrimination in terms of the formulation of rural-development strategies and the establishment of rural incentives, such as spatial tax holidays for rural enterprises and/or labour.

• Global warming is already adversely affecting the entire planet and many observers argue that sub-Saharan Africa will bear the brunt of the adverse effects of climate change. Though the SADC subregion is among are among the lowest emitters of carbon in the world, there is need to strategise at the subregional level on adaptation and mitigation measures. At first glance, the adoption of green technologies may appear well-suited for the subregion, given its advantages of plenty of sunshine, water, land and forests. However, because energy-generation, energy-saving, and carbon-capture are intensive in capital, governance capacity and skills (which are lacking in Africa) the advantages conferred by natural endowments are offset. Green technologies that are on the global agenda may be a barrier to trade in SADC and for African countries in general.

• The subregion’s food-security position remains alarming even though hunger levels have dropped, as measured by the Global Hunger Index.

Many SADC member States depend on food imports and the contagion effects of the crises on global food markets of 2007/2008 and 2010/2011 hit the subregion hard. With experts predicting that high and volatile food prices are likely to continue, SADC member States are not advised to use restrictive trade policies as a way to insulate their economies. Unpredictable government policies are more important than world market prices as causes of volatility in domestic prices. Therefore, the best subregional food-security strategy would be one that relies on a combination of increased productivity and general trade openness. This would be more effective than a strategy that primarily relies on closed borders.

The preservation of the symbiotic relationship between Nature and economic activities is essential for achieving food security and long-term human development. Being global in nature, sustainable human development is best achieved under subregional integration agreements through cooperation on aspects such as sustainable agriculture practices and environmental-friendly patterns of human settlement.

CHAPTER 7: Conclusion & Policy Recommendations

7.1 General closing remarks

In theory, regional economic integration can influence human development through four dimensions: income, access to services, empowerment and sustainability. However these links are not automatic and are contingent on a number of context-specific factors. Coun-tries may not have much control over some of these factors (UNDP, 2011). In the report, the subregional integration agenda under SADC and its effect on human development was viewed from five perspectives:

• Its effects on the status and evolution of traditional human-development indicators over time

• Its effect on the outcomes of trade and key economic variables

• Its influence on macroeconomic convergence

• Its influence on infrastructure development and

• Its influence on environment and food-security issues.

This chapter serves to commend what has gone right and to provide actionable recom-mendations targeted at specific stakeholders to address or redress the shortcomings.

Status of human development and subregional integration

In Chapter 2, it was concluded that the link between regional integration and human de-velopment was found to be largely absent, due to the prevalence of non-inclusive growth patterns in the subregion and the low priority accorded to social sectors, especially health and education. Moderate growth rates, high poverty levels (worse in the rural areas), high income inequalities and high unemployment levels (with gender bias) were generally seen to coexist, implying that the growth profiles prevalent in the subregion were not the type that would create jobs. Inclusive growth strategies are synonymous with increased social protection through social policies that are designed to promote social and economic inclu-sion into growth and development. Given the various subregional protocols and declara-tions relating to human development, to which SADC member States are signatories, much of the onus lies on national governments to make good on their commitments.

However, given the critical nature of social sectors such as education and especially health, respective member States of the subregion cannot be left to tackle this challenge alone.

Continued donor aid in these social sectors would be required, especially for the countries that are still recovering from domestic conflicts, such as DRC, Mozambique, Angola and, to a lesser extent, Zimbabwe.

Linkages between regional integration & human development – issues &

outcomes

The outcomes of regional economic integration have generally only had a weak influence on human development. Most notable was the insufficient stimulation of intra-regional

trade, which could have created income and employment opportunities in the subregion.

The wide view is that the adoption and use of restrictive rules of origin has largely contrib-uted to the failure to stimulate intra-regional trade in SADC. SADC rules of origin tend to replace transparent and declining tariff barriers in important sectors with complex and more restrictive input-sourcing requirements that diminish trade, increase transactions costs, reduce flexibility of producers and make the subregion less attractive for investment.

In addition, the erosion of trade-related gains due to the global crisis clearly highlight the subregion’s vulnerabilities to global shocks.

A good development among SADC member countries is the good national government stewardship shown in creating stable macroeconomic environments and good business and investment climates over the last 20 years. However, more efforts have to be made at the national levels to fight growing levels of corruption.

Macro policy and economic convergence

Regional integration can lead to equitable and balanced development of member States when gaps between member States’ incomes and other macroeconomic performance in-dicators are observed to converge over time. Where there has been macroeconomic con-vergence in the subregion, it has occurred at low levels. This suggest that a re-thinking and possible re-formulation of SADC’s macro-policies, frameworks and strategies could increase the pace of convergence.

Generally SADC member States appear to have achieved a reasonable degree of economic convergence in terms of real GDP per capita, nominal rates of export growth (albeit at very low levels) and modest holdings of international reserves. In a rather cursory sense the SADC member States also converged towards generally lower levels of external debt stocks, although global debt-reduction initiatives were underpinning this process.

To consolidate all the positive elements of its macroeconomic convergence, the SADC subregion should buy into and build on the track record that has already been achieved in the area of negotiating and establishing trade agreements as a useful avenue for restructur-ing macroeconomic policies, after considerrestructur-ing the political, social, economic and demo-graphic factors that led to these circumstances.

Infrastructure and human development

Infrastructure development plays an important role in facilitating trade, growth and ulti-mately human development in schemes for regional integration. These links are largely ab-sent in the SADC subregion because of the low levels of infrastructure development. Trade facilitation is stifled by the limited quantity and/or poor quality of essential infrastructure services, such as roads, ICTs and energy. These bottlenecks lower trade and commerce facilitation and lessen access to factor and output markets, which in turn translates into higher costs of production that are usually passed on to the consumer.

There is vast scope for more cooperation on infrastructure development in SADC: over 80 per cent of the estimated hydropower potential is unexploited, transport infrastructure is limited and accessing ICTs is expensive. Subregional efforts to surmount some of these constraints, especially in ICTs, can be achieved through promotion of investments into

research and development in this sector to help reduce ICT costs. However, promotion needs to be scaled up of public-private partnerships in these long-term infrastructure proj-ects.

Access to water sources and sanitation in the subregion has not improved significantly.

The general challenges that constrain SADC member States from providing proper water-supply and sanitation include poor financial performance, inadequate institutional ca-pacities, poor monitoring and reporting systems, lack of effective sector plans and poor information-sharing and sector-learning. Subregional institutions and the donor commu-nity should conduct country-specific missions in order to build capacities to address some

The general challenges that constrain SADC member States from providing proper water-supply and sanitation include poor financial performance, inadequate institutional ca-pacities, poor monitoring and reporting systems, lack of effective sector plans and poor information-sharing and sector-learning. Subregional institutions and the donor commu-nity should conduct country-specific missions in order to build capacities to address some