an Eldis Resource

This paper reviews food security vulnerability concepts and relates these to proximate as well as long run factors implicated in the food security crisis in southern Africa.

Findings include:

• some principal causes of broad scale rising vulnerability across the southern African region are:
  • growth failures, rising poverty and declining migration options
  • market failures in the context of market liberalisation
  • the high incidence and continuing spread of HIV/AIDS
  • politics and governance factors, at regional, national and local levels
  these four factors create widespread adverse impacts on the ability of people to manage risk, and to cope with risky events when they occur. Falling GDP increases vulnerability wherever it occurs
• in the rural and agricultural economies of the southern African countries, market liberalisation has increased price risks, raised ratios between input and output prices, resulted in uneven private market coverage, and reduced the outreach of advisory services to crops and livestock. Its most severe effects have been on remote and subsistence farmers
• HIV/AIDS is a major contributor to rising vulnerability in the region. However, the relations between people and land in the agrarian economy will evolve as morbidity and mortality from HIV/AIDS increases, and outcomes for proneness to acute food insecurity triggered by natural events are likely to change over time
• PRSPs tend to favour sectoral targets in areas like education, health, or rural roads, but fail to address the diversified nature of livelihoods, nor the governance environment that might facilitate and encourage the multiplication of diverse economic activities rather than block and undermine them. Under some circumstances, decentralisation may undermine the goals of PRSPs due to the revenue needs of district councils and the approaches they take to taxation of their constituents in order to meet those needs

The paper recommends that peoples own inventive solutions need to be released from the tyranny of a public sector institutional environment that preoccupies itself with hampering and blocking peoples efforts to devise new livelihood sources instead of encouraging and facilitating them to do so.

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