Speaking at the World Congress of Rural Sociology, the Director-General of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) José Graziano da Silva challenged academics to get involved in essential and politically important research into rural poverty and the food and agriculture business as it pertains to small-scale producers. He identified the most pressing issues in the fight against hunger and rural underdevelopment as food insecurity, nutrient deficiencies and unsafe food, as well as unequal competition between small-scale and large food producers. He singled out large-scale investments in agriculture or ‘land-grabbing’ as a politically important area where universities could conduct research into principles for responsible agricultural investments. Such research could feed into the work of the Committee on World Food Security, the leading global forum for discussions on food security issues, he said. How to integrate small-scale farmers into the agricultural and food chains should be another area of academic concern. Academics should look into the issue of governance of the food and agriculture sector, both at global and local levels, and how to achieve a fair distribution of benefits.
Poverty and health
Faced with increasingly unpredictable rains and rising agricultural input costs, many of Swaziland's smallholder farmers are no longer able to make a living relying on traditional methods to grow maize, the staple crop, according to IRIN News. Externally funded schemes to subsidise the cost of seed and fertiliser have dried up and a Ministry of Agriculture service to provide affordable tractor hire has been a casualty of the government's cash flow problems. Distribution schemes to the needy are failing because of a lack of technical assistance to ensure that recipients use the inputs correctly for maximum benefit. Their reach was also small, with experts estimating that only about a tenth of Swaziland's 260,000 farming households benefited. As the cost of both inputs and food has risen significantly over the past year, many subsistence farmers have had to prioritise food over fertiliser in the context of declining maize production during the 2011-12 season.
Up to half of all children presenting to nutrition rehabilitation units (NRUs) in Malawi are infected with HIV. This study aimed to identify features suggestive of HIV in children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM). All 1,024 children admitted to the Blantyre NRU between July 2006 and March 2007 had demographic, anthropometric and clinical characteristics documented on admission. HIV status was known for 904 children, with 445 (43%) seropositive and 459 (45%) seronegative. Associations were found for the following signs: chronic ear discharge, lymphadenopathy, clubbing, marasmus, hepato-splenomegally and oral candida. Any one of these signs was present in 74% of the HIV seropositive and 38% of HIV-uninfected children. HIV-infected children were more stunted, wasted and anaemic than uninfected children. In conclusion, features commonly associated with HIV were often present in uninfected children with SAM, and HIV could neither be diagnosed nor excluded using these. The study recommends HIV testing be offered to all children with SAM where HIV is prevalent.
In this article, the author, an environmental blogger, puts forward five reasons why urban farming is one of the major social movements in the world today. First, the urban farming movement has the potential to reinvigorate local commerce by encouraging local farmers to trade with one another. Second, urban farmers are usually better stewards of their land because they directly bear the ecological costs of their actions, whereas industrial agriculture usually manoeuvers to avoid paying for environmental costs. Rather than using chemicals that destroy soil biology, urban farming culture stresses sustainable organic techniques that enrich the topsoil. Third, urban farming makes it clearer and easier for people to be involved in local politics by bringing issues that directly affect communities to the fore. Fourth, urban agriculture can also bring about a revolution of health and nutrition because it supplies fresh, organic produce. And finally, urban farming is inherently an activity that helps build a sense of community. Growing food is, after all, a cooperative effort, as knowledge of how and what to grow is exchanged, seeds are swapped, labour is shared, and the harvest is traded. As urban farming grows, the author predicts a stronger interdependence within urban communities is likely to result as local food systems bring more community interaction into people’s daily lives.
In this article, International Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) offers five strategies to reduce the psychological trauma experienced by African AIDS orphans. In Africa, most orphans remain with their extended families, being cared for by either the remaining parent, or by grandparents or other relatives, and this approach has been shown to minimise trauma for the children. Institutional care should only be a temporary solution or last resort, the article argues. Also, keeping brothers and sisters together also enhances their emotional wellbeing. Other strategies include meeting the basic needs of orphans, for example by instituting school feeding schemes and providing social grants, as well as providing psycho-social care in the form of grief counseling and peer support groups. Governments should also ensure that orphans remain at school. So far, free primary education has gone some way to improving overall school attendance, but other factors, such as living with a non-relative, appear to continue to hamper orphans' education. Finally, the article agues for more support for the carers of orphans, especially custodial grandparents. It recommends that health workers and home-based caregivers be trained to support orphans' caregivers.
Using panel data from Mozambique collected in 2007 and 2008, the authors explore the impact of the food crisis on welfare of households with people living with HIV and AIDS. The analysis finds that there has been a real deterioration of welfare in terms of income, food consumption, and nutritional status in Mozambique between 2007 and 2008, among both sets of households. Households with people living with HIV have not suffered more from the crisis than others. Results on the evolution of labour-force participation suggests that initiation of treatment and better services in health facilities have counterbalanced the effect of the crisis by improving the health of patients and their labour-force participation. The authors look at the effect of the change in welfare on the frequency of visits to health facilities and on treatment outcomes. Both variables can proxy for adherence to treatment. This is a particularly crucial issue as it affects both the health of the patient and public health because sub-optimal adherence leads to the development of resistant forms of the virus. The authors find no effect of the change in welfare on the frequency of visits, but they do find that people who experienced a negative income shock also experienced a reduction or a slower progress in treatment outcomes.
The number of people requiring humanitarian assistance in the Horn of Africa could increase sharply in coming months due to below-average rainfall and high food and fuel prices, say aid workers. According to the World Food Programme, the Horn of Africa drought, which began with the failure of the short rains in December 2010, is the first since a two-year regional drought in 2007-2009 that saw the number of people needing humanitarian assistance in the region rise to more than 20 million. Conflict over rising food prices could further increase the number of people requiring help. While governments of the affected countries have already started interventions, short- and long-term international assistance is needed to help address critical needs but also underlying structural causes and chronic vulnerabilities. What is needed, according to this article, is a set of interventions which strengthens people's own resilience capacity and coping mechanisms to survive such severe conditions while at the same time responding to their current humanitarian needs and protecting their livelihoods. It is crucial that people can feed themselves through their own means instead of being dependent on food distributions.
In the last decade a number of initiatives have been used in Malawi to tackle the issue of household food insecurity. One of the most controversial has been the Starter Pack programme launched in 1998. Initially consisting of a free handout of packs of improved maize seed, legumes and fertiliser to every small holder farm household in Malawi the scheme, under donor pressure, was subsequently scaled down to become a form of targeted social safety net programme. This paper analyses the strengths and weakness of both the original programme and its scaled down version.
This book analyses interactions between food insecurity, vulnerability and the right to food. The significance of a human rights approach, and the way in which it translates to gender considerations, with links to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, agricultural productivity and the environment, adds a new dimension to the problem of world hunger. By exploring these approaches to hunger this volume shifts away from research on macro food availability to more composite dimensions cutting across economics, sociology, law and politics. It includes a chapter on Food Security in the SADC Region: An Assessment of National Trade Strategy in the Context of the 2001-03 Food Crisis by A.Charman & J.Hodge and on Gender, HIV/AIDS and Rural Livelihoods: Micro-Level Investigations in Three African Countries by J.Curry, E.Wiegers, A.Garbero, S.Stokes & J.Hourihan.
This paper reports the association between food insufficiency (not having enough food to eat over the previous 12 months) and inconsistent condom use, sex exchange, and other measures of risky sex in a cross-sectional population-based study of 1,255 adults in Botswana and 796 adults in Swaziland using a stratified two-stage probability design. Associations were examined using multivariable logistic regression analyses, clustered by country and stratified by gender. Food insufficiency was reported by 32% of women and 22% of men over the previous 12 months. Among 1,050 women in both countries, after controlling for respondent characteristics including income and education, HIV knowledge, and alcohol use, food insufficiency was signficcantly associated with inconsistent condom use with a nonprimary partner, sex exchange, intergenerational sexual relationships and lack of control in sexual relationships. Associations between food insufficiency and risky sex were much attenuated among men.