There has been growing policy interest in social justice issues related to both health and food. The authors sought to understand the state of knowledge on relationships between health equity and food systems, where the concepts of ‘food security’ and ‘food sovereignty’ are prominent. Combinations of health equity and food security (1414 citations) greatly outnumbered pairings with food sovereignty (18 citations). Prominent crosscutting themes that were observed included climate change, biotechnology, gender, racialization, indigeneity, poverty, citizenship and HIV as well as institutional barriers to reducing health inequities in the food system. The literature indicates that food sovereignty-based approaches to health in specific contexts, such as advancing healthy school food systems, promoting soil fertility, gender equity and nutrition, and addressing structural racism, can complement the longer-term socio-political restructuring processes that health equity requires. The authors’ conceptual model is argued to offer a useful starting point for identifying interventions with strong potential to promote health equity.
Poverty and health
Food security can be defined as ‘having enough physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food’. Threats include the ability of people to deal with declining farm productivity or the loss of assets before or after harvest. Increasingly, the traditional rural focus of food security is shifting due to rapid urbanisation and growing urban slums. Approximately 800 million people in the developing world are undernourished and suffering from chronic hunger.
Access to poor quality and inexpensive food that are high in fats and refined carbohydrates have the potential to expose children to obesity. Fighting obesity could translate into a decrease in the number of adults who suffer from non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. In this edition of NGO Pulse, Lauren Graham, a senior researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development for Africa, writes that with the current drought and increased food prices, it is becoming more expensive and difficult for families, especially those in poor communities, to afford and opt for healthier food baskets. Graham, who argues that it is easy and cost effective to prevent obesity and overweight, adds that: “Obesity is not necessarily driven by overeating, as is commonly thought.” She notes that children who grow up in poor communities are at high risk for obesity and ‘hidden hunger’ since they have no option but to consume food that lacks the right balance of nutritious meals.
Urban and regional planning is under the spotlight in Kenya. The 2009 National Housing and Population Census forecast that the percentage of Kenyans living in urban settlements will increase from 32 percent to 54 percent by 2030. Residents of Nairobi await the details of a new city master plan. The devolution of power and allocation of central resources to the 47 county governments created by the 2010 constitution is under way – a process that requires integrated development plans to be in place. In the post-independence era, urban planning was deployed as a tool for “modernisation” in Kenya. But in the 1980s and 1990s modernisation was supplanted by autocracy and straitened economic circumstances. In turn, planning became a means for securing control, exclusion and further enrichment of political and economic elites redolent of the colonial era. Legislation based on outdated and inappropriate models such as the UK’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act was routinely used to carry out mass evictions and demolitions in informal settlements in Kenya. By the end of the 20th century, the planning profession had become irrelevant or discredited to all but its few beneficiaries. In this paper the author describes in detail how the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP) at the University of Nairobi – and other institutions – have sought to revitalise and encourage the adoption of more progressive approaches among planning professionals. Curricula reform, research and innovation, close links with other planning schools in Africa, and working partnerships with civil society organisations in informal settlements are the bedrock of the effort to ensure that Kenya’s future urban planners are equipped to manage rapid urban transformation.
Increased agricultural development in Zambia will compromise the country’s food security if peasant farmers continue to be driven off customary land to pave the way for large-scale local and foreign agribusiness, according to the University of Zambia’s Dean of the School of agriculture, Mickey Mwala. He argued that smallholder farmers are responsible for food security in Zambia. Land grabs and forced evictions of local farmers by both foreign and local investors are common, according to the Zambia Land Alliance, a land rights advocacy organisation. The Alliance blames the eviction of farmers on the cumbersome procedures involved in obtaining title deeds and “archaic” laws, which do not recognise customary rights as a form of land ownership. Under Zambian law, title deeds are the only legal proof of ownership of land. To get a title deed takes between two months and 10 years and is discouragingly complicated for illiterate applicants who cannot afford legal assistance.
Sub-Saharan Africa is currently in the midst of an unprecedented wave of urbanisation that is expected to have wide-ranging implications for food and nutrition security. Though this spatial transformation of the population is increasingly put forward as one of the main drivers of changes in food consumption patterns, empirical evidence remains scarce and the comparative descriptive design of existing research is prone to selection bias as urban residence is far from random. Based upon longitudinal data from the Tanzania National Panel Survey and the Kagera Health and Development Survey, this study is the first to assess the impact of urbanisation on food consumption through comparing individuals’ food consumption patterns before and after they have migrated from rural to urban areas. The authors find that even after controlling for individual fixed heterogeneity, baseline observable characteristics and initial household fixed effects, urbanisation is significantly associated with important changes in dietary patterns, including a shift away from traditional staples towards more processed and ready-to-eat foods. While there is some evidence of changes that can be deemed beneficial from a nutritional point of view - including increased consumption of vegetables and animal source foods - the results also largely confirm concerns about the association between urbanisation and heightened consumption of sugar and fats. In addition, the authors find no support for the hypothesis that urbanisation is associated with more diverse diets. Finally, the results indicate that rural-urban migration significantly contributes to reducing volatility in food consumption.
This paper argues that many of the world’s extreme poor live in countries where the total cost of ending extreme poverty is not prohibitively high as a percentage of gross domestic product. In the not-too-distant future, the author argues that most of the world’s poor people will live in countries that have the domestic financial scope to end extreme poverty and, in time, moderate poverty. This calls in the authors opinion for a (re)framing of poverty as a matter of national distribution and national social and political contracts between elites, middle classes and poor people.
To feed the world’s growing population in a sustainable and inclusive way with good quality food is one of the main challenges facing the world in the 21st Century. The author of this article argues that the solution lies partly at the local level: the livelihoods, and the cultural, socioeconomic and environmental circumstances in which food is produced, processed and distributed. This means that the debate around food security should move to the local level and how small-scale farmers can be part of (formal) food markets, mainly regionally, in a sustainable way. Building resilient and inclusive local food markets also requires policies that take the macro-level players into account, that link the local to the global. More comprehensive knowledge and research into food security is needed, and the role of civil society and local governments should also be studied. This implies participation and a bottom-up approach. Currently, investments in food security are mainly channelled through national policies and centralised negotiations; however, these decisions should be made within a participatory local democracy.
Gender equality is essential for poverty reduction and sustained economic growth, yet lack of money remains one of the greatest impediments to achieving it. In a new compilation of essays from around the world, gender experts and development practitioners examine how to ensure that sufficient financial resources are available to make the changes that not only affect the lives of millions of women, but also impact on society as a whole. One of the biggest impediments to gender equality is lack of money. Although countries have signed up to the Monterrey Consensus and have developed plans of action for women, national and state budgets have not reflected the same priorities. The Monterrey Consensus is distinguished by its recognition of both the need for developing countries to take responsibility for their own poverty reduction and the necessity for rich nations to support this endeavour with more open trade and increased financial aid. Lack of access to land, credit, information, lack of participation in decision-making within the family and community and their reproductive role mean that women's capacity to take advantage of economic opportunities is inhibited. Although it has been recognised that these issues have serious costs to society, there has not been solid progress in formulating and implementing policies and programmes that are gender-sensitive. The paper calls for governments, bilateral and multilateral organisations to scale up their commitments to financing gender equality, making a real difference to the lives of women, reduce poverty and promote sustainable development.
In reflections on her fieldwork in South Africa, Asanda Benya writes about the difficulties and insights she gained while researching underground female mine-workers. Through immersive anthropological research she examined how women make sense of themselves against the masculine underground and mining culture. Some women often remarked that they were “men at work, and women at home”. They admitted to changing how they behaved in the multiple spaces they navigated. It is these shifts in women’s gender performances and identities that the study explored. To get at these gender performances and gendered identities she spent almost a year working underground as a winch operator, and a general labourer, pulling blasted rock from the stope face to the tip.