About this companion website
The companion website of the book Food Security in the Developing World is presented here, comprising ten Case Studies from the developing world, arranged over four geographic Sections, each Case Study exemplifying one or more of the key issues introduced in the book, thereby providing a more detailed real-life context. Too often ‘food security’ in the mind of the general public equates only to food ‘availability’. Often missing or insufficient is the imperative of seamless and holistic integration of this availability with economic, social and physical access to food, and the nutritional, utilization and food safety components, as also the imperative that all these parameters of achieving food security need to be accounted for on a simultaneous and stable basis in the time dimension.
Multi-dimensional analysis often shows multiple causes of food and nutrition insecurity. A given community in an urban slum environment in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, say, may exhibit pronounced child stunting because of contaminated food or water, a predisposition to malaria in the squalid environment of slums (Case Study 10 below), or be hungry because of an absentee father and the mother having too many children to afford to feed well (Case Study 9). A community in the mountains of Lao (Case Study 6) or Nepal will likely have a high prevalence of stunting, due to the inaccessibility of their village, and related poorly functioning markets and ignorance about a balanced diet.
Even familiarity with the medley of direct causes (Chapter 3 of the companion book) is insufficient for an holistic understanding of food security in a given community, unless seen against the background of livelihoods, for it is these which determine whether or not that community has achieved stable food security, or can ever achieve it. In developing countries, a family often employs a basket of livelihood options as an insurance against the preferred one(s) failing. So, for instance, if the rains are good, with neither drought nor flood, the land which a family uses may provide much or all of its food requirement, even a surplus to raise cash to buy shoes and pay school fees. In the event of unsatisfactory rains, however, the family has to consider other options. These may comprise able-bodied men seeking employment as seasonal fruit pickers in a neighboring country or under contract in the Persian Gulf as construction workers, with women providing home help there.
Both Palestinians and Yeminis know that a livelihood in the Gulf can collapse, because of political decisions beyond their control, so that they have to go home in a hurry, and the flow of remittances stops. As a frequent visitor to Yemen over the years, the current author noted how the fabric of splendid houses built in rural areas using these remittances, started to deteriorate through lack of maintenance when they stopped. Remittances of expatriate Somalis to families back home, which constituted at one time 20 per cent of GDP, was compromised by decisions of banks to disallow transmission of these remittances for fear that funds for Al Shabab insurgents were being obtained in this way. So, livelihood strategies can implode suddenly, putting stress on food and nutrition security as well as other aspects of living standards.
Further examples of undulating fortunes occur when people in one ethnicity in a country receive a boost to their opportunities and well-being when one of their own is in power in State House. Yet this boom time can quickly end when the Presidency changes hands, and funds from the Treasury are channeled instead to another part of the country.
A widespread instance of livelihoods being compromised is through conflict and socio-political upheaval, and the ensuing mass displacement of people fleeing from trouble to other areas of the country or across national borders, where the threat is deemed less. The companion book gives examples of IDPs in northern Nigeria fleeing from Boko Haram, and Case Study 4 below cites Columbian refugees fleeing into Ecuador, and the pressure put on livelihoods and food security of both the displaced groups and host communities. Case Studies 3 and 5 give voice to the smallholders and forest dwellers in Latin America finding that their sustainable livelihoods are upended by large scale deforestation to make way for capital-intensive plantation crops, ranching and mineral extraction. Case Study 7 examines how the Kuchi pastoralists and their livelihood is compromised by insurgency and drought affecting their traditional pastures.
With conflicts seemingly out of control in western Asia, population pressure on land and water ever increasing in sub-Saharan Africa for instance, and climate change threatening many coastal cities and Small Island Developing States with flooding and salinization, livelihood security and downstream food security will become further threatened. Not only these, but regional stability too, this being discussed in several of the Case Studies below.
How vital therefore, for strategic planning to be strengthened at national and regional level, in a multi-sectoral way, using existing platforms and fora to coherently and sustainably mitigate current threats to livelihoods and food security, and build resilience and synergies against foreseen future threats.
Yet this companion website also draws attention to success stories, in Case Studies 1 and 2, for instance. The good outcomes of the Productive Safety Net Program in Ethiopia, in the wake of a history of environmental degradation and famine, and the promise offered by conservation agriculture in Zambia - if the main constraint of shortage of mechanized services can be addressed through targeted investments.
Yet there is no comfort in telling this to the lady villagers of the dryland Caprivi Strip in northern Namibia, who can no longer sell their handicraft to package holiday tourists coming across the land border from Zimbabwe – because Zimbabwe is not a significant tourist destination at the moment, hence few day trippers to Caprivi. Having been on the shelves of roadside stalls for too long with no turnover, the ladies’ creations of plaited grass and seeds disintegrate as soon as they are handled, and have no value even should tourists start returning in numbers. The search for new livelihoods to drive food security is a never-ending challenge, and will become ever more necessary in the troubled times ahead as natural resources per head of population decrease.