A vicious cycle: AIDS, famine and poverty

Smallholder peasant families in Malawi face two major risks: AIDS and famine. Malawi has the eighth highest prevalence of HIV and AIDS in the world. It is also prone to food shortage and experienced a major famine in 2001-02.

Researchers from CARE International in the USA, and Oxford University in the UK, examine the relationship between famine and HIV and AIDS in rural Malawi. Historically, Malawian rural households relied on migrant labour in the country’s tea plantations, and mining industries of neighbouring countries. This helped to support their subsistence agriculture and protect them against the effects of famine and food shortage.

Over the past two decades, migrant labour opportunities have reduced. During the recent famine, rural households had to rely heavily on ‘ganyu’ casual labour for food security, rather than on income from out-migration. These shifts in livelihoods patterns have occurred due to increasing HIV prevalence in rural areas of the country.

Ganyu traditionally involved people exchanging their labour for goods, services or cash within their neighbourhoods. In recent years, poorer farming households have become increasingly reliant on ganyu labour to meet their immediate food needs.

During the famine women, facing intense competition because labour supply far exceeded demand, often resorted to travelling outside the village to find ganyu work. They sometimes engaged in compromising sexual transactions. Their exposure to the long-term risk of contracting HIV and AIDS was weighted against the more immediate need of preventing their household from starvation.

The research shows:

• Women’s transactional sex became increasingly incorporated into informal ganyu labour contracts during the famine. Introducing safe sex practices into this kind of informal transaction is extremely difficult.
• AIDS is taking a devastating toll on agricultural families: of the households surveyed, five percent had one or more members who were chronically sick. Forty-three percent had one or more members who were intermittently ill.
• Traditional religious and cultural leaders, the media, and the National AIDS Commission all play a role in influencing sexual behaviour in an era of HIV/AIDS. However, the messages they promote can be conflicting.
• In the last 10 years, the rate of HIV infection among women, particularly young women, is rising faster than the rate for men.

Just as HIV and AIDS is increasing vulnerability to famine, famine is increasing vulnerability to HIV and AIDS. Policies must be specifically directed at breaking this vicious cycle. The researchers recommend:

• Achieving food security should be the first priority for policymakers. A free supply of agricultural inputs is preferable and less expensive than humanitarian responses to frequent famine.
• Supporting rural people, particularly women and young people, to diversify their self-employed income-earning activities. This would decrease their reliance on exploitative ganyu contracts.
• Increasing women’s control over their livelihoods would help them reduce their risk of contracting HIV.

Source(s):
‘Risking Death for Survival: Peasant Responses to Hunger and HIV/AIDS in Malawi’ World Development 34, 8, pages 1654–1666, by Deborah Fahy Bryceson and Jodie Fonseca, 2006

Funded by: CARE International, International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Regional Network on HIV/AIDS, Rural Livelihoods and Food Security.

id21 Research Highlight: 7 December 2006

Further Information:
Deborah Fahy Bryceson
International Gender Studies Centre
Queen Elizabeth House
Oxford University
Oxford
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 1865 292801
Contact the contributor: dfbryceson@bryceson.net

University of Oxford, UK

Jodie Fonseca
CARE International
1625 K Street, NW
Suite 500
Washington, D.C. 20006
USA

Tel: +1 202 595 2800
Contact the contributor: j.fonseca@care.org

CARE International, USA

Other related links:
'Food supplements for malnourished AIDS sufferers in Malawi do not work'

'Community treatment for HIV-related malnutrition in Malawi'

'Caring for AIDS patients at home in Malawi'

'The southern Africa crisis: food insecurity, HIV/AIDS and the international response'