Progressing towards nutritional health in Sub-Saharan Africa: An econometric analysis of the effect of sustainable food production on malnutrition.

Abstract

In 1945 the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) chose its Latin motto 'fiat panis' which translates as 'let there be bread' to prevent an unprecedented health catastrophe as a result of endemic hunger and poor nutritional health. Despite the long standing effort in this regard, for so many people, especially in developing economies in sub-Saharan Africa, access to enough, good quality, and constant supply of food and water remains an affront to good nutritional health. Globally, the FAO reports that 815 million people representing 10% of the population worldwide are currently undernourished. Our study investigates the effect of sustainable food production on malnutrition across sub-Saharan African countries. An ensemble of more sophisticated econometric models is applied to dynamic cross-country panel data from 16 countries in the 4 regions in Sub-Saharan African. Our study is innovative because it makes a pioneering contribution to the available stock of literature on indicators of sustainable food production and malnutrition which is still at an embryonic stage. We note that even though sub-Sahara African has a large tract of arable land, it negatively contributes towards malnutrition. We observed a positive and statistically significant relationship between food production (crop and livestock) and agricultural labour on malnutrition. Policy recommendations have been proposed to improve higher nutritional health through food production.