Food Crisis In Africa Research Articles

The Communication Environment of the Food Crisis in Africa

The Communication Environment of the Food Crisis in Africa

Coping with Africa's Food Crisis

Coping with Africa's Food Crisis

The African food crisis and the role of food aid

Although not always as visible as the Ethiopian famine, there has been a food crisis in Africa for at least 25 years, characterized by a steady decline in per capita food production. This has largely been caused by insufficient foreign exchange earnings, aggravated by low world food prices and other global developments over which sub-Saharan Africa has had no control. There is an urgent need for an increase in regular food and non-food aid. Contrary to common belief, such aid can be used to stimulate local agricultural production. This article outlines seven major measures which could be applied to food aid to ensure that this happens.

Coping With Africa's Food Crisis

Coping With Africa's Food Crisis

World Recession and the Food Crisis in Africa

World Recession and the Food Crisis in Africa

Editorial Africa's food crisis: what is to be done?

Editorial Africa's food crisis: what is to be done?

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Managing Third World Debt. Report of the Second Working Party established by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Overseas Development. The Developing Country Debt Crisis. By David Lomax. Debt and Development Crises in Latin America: The End of An Illusion. By Stephany Griffith‐Jones and Osvaldo Sunkel. The Common Agricultural Policy and the Less Developed Countries. By Alan Matthews. Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics. Edited by P.R. Krugman. Trade Policy, Protectionism and the Third World. By Michael Davenport. Changes on the Euphrates: Villagers, Townsmen and Employees in Northern Syria. By Annika Rabo. Agricultural Project Management: Monitoring and Control of Implementation. By Peter Smith. Food in Sub‐Saharan AJrica. Edited by Art Hansen and Della E. McMillan. Accelerating Food Production in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Edited by John W. Mellor, Christopher L. Delgado and Malcolm J. Blackie. Drought and Hunger in AJrica: Lknying Famine a Future. Edited by Michael H. Glantz. Agricultural Development in Southern Africa: Farm Household Economics and the Food Crisis. By Allan Low. World Recession and the Food Crisis in Africa. Edited by Peter Lawrence. Africa's Development Criris. By P. Ndegwa. Agrarian Change in Egypt: An Anatomy of Rural Poverty. By Samir Radwan and Eddy Lee. Swedish Development Aid in Perspective: Policies, Problems and Results since 1952. Edited by P. Fruhling. Agricultural Exports and Economic Growth — A Study of Botswana's Beef Indutry. By Michael Hubbard. The Guardian Third World Review: Voices from the South. Edited by Victoria Brittain and Michael Simmons. Rainwater Harvesting: The Collection of Rainfall and Runoff in Rural Areas. By Arnold Pacey with Adrian Cullis.

Water for food production in Sub-Saharan Africa

Water control is an essential requirement if food and energy crises in Africa are to be resolved on a sustainable basis. The paper reviews the problems and prospects associated with the expansion of irrigation in Africa, where experiences with large and medium scale water management have been of comparatively recent origin. The present status of water development and management issues are approached carefully and cautiously, they can make an important and lasting contribution to the resolution of Africa's food crisis.

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Food Economy in Hungary. By Ernö Csizmadia and Magda Székely Corporate Innovation: Marketing and Strategy. By Gordon R. Foxall The Economic Mind: The Social Psychology of Economic Behaviour. By Adrian Furnham and Alan Lewis Mathematical Programming for Economic Analysis in Agriculture. By Peter B. R. Hazell and Roger D. Norton Development Economics on Trial: The Anthropological Case for a Prosecution. By Polly Hill Elements of Agricultural Trade Policies. By James P. Houck World Food Marketing Systems. Edited by Erdener Kaynak Creating Rural Employment. By B. H. Kinsey Measuring the Benefits of Clean Air and Water. By Allen V. Kneese The Economics of Natural Environments: Studies in the Valuation of Commodity and Amenity Resources (2nd edition). By John V. Krutilla and Anthony C. Fisher World Recession and the Food Crisis in Africa. Edited by Peter Lawrence The Victorian Countryside (2 vols). Edited by G. E. Mingay Economics of Crop Insurance with Special Reference to the Needs and Situations in Developing Countries. By P. K. Ray Calcutta Crop Insurance for Agricultural Development: Issues and Experience. Edited by Peter Hazell, Carlos Pomareda and Alberto Valdes. Agricultural Insurance: A New Policy for Developing Countries. By Syed M. Ahsan. Aldershot Hoofprints on the Forest: Cattle Ranching and the Destruction of Latin America's Tropical Forests. By Douglas R. Shane Getting Prices Right: The Scope and Limits of Agricultural Price Policy. By C. Peter Timmer

The Food Crisis and the Socialist State in Lusophone Africa

To state that government policy has been at the heart of the agrarian crisis in Lusophone Africa is not to deny the importance of drought, the depressed state of international commodity markets, and externally-provoked destabilization in contributing to food shortages and declining volumes of agricultural exports. Rather, this essay argues that commercial, fiscal, and exchange rate policies and the response of the majority of rural producers to them were the most important factors determining the conditions of production and trade during the period 1974-1984. In her review of the literature on the food crisis in Africa, Sara Berry (1983) singles out the secular struggle over access to resources as motivating African governments in their policy-making. The crisis in Lusophone Africa can be viewed as a struggle between state officials and peasants over the amount and disposition of marketable surpluses. In each of the countries, politicians and bureaucrats sought control over the marketing and pricing of agricultural products and over the importation of basic consumer goods more as a means of securing state revenues and personal gain than as an instrument for promoting rural development. Resistance to exploitative policies by food and export crop producers has been the main reason for the agricultural decline until at least 1984. This resistance manifested itself in various ways: diminished production, parallel markets, smuggling, emigration and support for antigovernment forces. Such behavior has been described before, notably by Robert Bates in his work Markets and States in Tropical Africa (1981). Bates examined how the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, the Sudan and the Ivory Coast squeezed the incomes of small rural cultivators through taxation, overvalued exchange rates, and monosoponistic marketing boards. Bates explained that governments were attempting to extract revenues and export commodities for financing the state apparatus as well as cheap food and raw materials in the interests of urban industrialists and workers. He also pointed out that governments neglected investment in food-producing sectors, preferring (more for political than economic reasons) investments in state farms and larger scale capital-intensive projects where benefits were directed towards client groups. More often than not, the interests of small producers were undermined. This article

Agricultural Policy in Tropical Africa: is a Turnaround Possible?

AbstractThe food crisis in Africa has entered our living rooms through television and the press. Why is per capita agricultural production lower now than at independence in the early 1960s? This article examines the factors responsible and outlines some solutions. Both external and internal factors have converged to create the crisis ‐ low prices to farmers to placate vocal urban consumers, inefficient, high‐cost marketing boards, governments' neglect of agriculture in favor of industry, over‐valued exchange rates, lack of foreign exchange and increasing debt burdens. Externally the depressed world market decreased demand for Africa's exports and contributed to the stagnation of the economics. Drought, a population growth rate approaching 3%/year and a shortage of human capital added to the crisis.

Against many odds: the dilemmas of women's self-help groups in Mbeere, Kenya

Opening ParagraphOne of the major, and perhaps the most embarrassing, problems still facing African populations today is hunger. It is described by Lofchie and Commins (1982: 1) as ‘the most immediate, visible, and compelling symptom of a continent-wide agricultural breakdown in tropical Africa,’ thereby making ‘sub-Sahara Africa … the only region in the world where food production per capita has declined during the past two decades.’ This condition has been blamed on many factors, the most frequently mentioned being climate, environmental degradation, outmoded and inefficient traditional agricultural methods, customary land tenure systems which inhibit innovation by individual farmers, lack of incentives to farmers to increase food outputs, bad agricultural policies, high population growth rates and agrarian dualism. A growing body of literature focusing on women's contributions in the development process has revealed another very crucial, but often ignored, reason why hunger is still prevalent in Africa: the disregard of the role of women, who are the main food producers in Africa, in efforts to promote agricultural development (Baumann, 1928; Boserup, 1970; Bryson, 1981; Guyer, 1980; Robertson, 1983). A recent book by Odero-Ogwel (1983), which discusses the food problems in Africa, pays no attention to the fact that a major contributory factor to the food crisis in Africa is the disadvantaged position of women. This exemplifies the failure, even by African intellectuals, to realise the crucial role women can play in increasing food supplies if only certain constraints are removed. Claire Robertson (1983) warns that, unless women are fully included in the development process, the food problem in Africa will deteriorate even further.

Farmer organizations and food production in Zimbabwe

Institutional analysis of the food crisis in Africa must extend beyond a concern with the operation of central states and markets. Collective action among smallholders is a necessary adjunct to outside intervention. This article reports on the effect of farmer organization on food production in Zimbabwe in the period 1980–1985. A typology of farmer groups in developed based upon the nature of the resources that are mobilized for agricultural production. Evidence is presented to show how farmer groups improve access to household assets and agricultural services for their members. The impressive recent record of maize output in Zimbabwe is traced in part to the initiatives of small farmers to organize themselves.

Agricultural policy in tropical Africa: is a turnaround possible?

The food crisis in Africa has entered our living rooms through television and the press. Why is per capita agricultural production lower now than at independence in the early 1960s? This article examines the factors responsible and outlines some solutions. Both external and internal factors have converged to create the crisis — low prices to farmers to placate vocal urban consumers, inefficient, high-cost marketing boards, governments' neglect of agriculture in favor of industry, over-valued exchange rates, lack of foreign exchange and increasing debt burdens. Externally the depressed world market decreased demand for Africa's exports and contributed to the stagnation of the economics. Drought, a population growth rate approaching 3%/year and a shortage of human capital added to the crisis.

Domestic Food Pricing Policy, Food Aid and the Food Crisis in Africa

Multiple regression techniques are employed to examine the impacts of domestic food pricing policy, food aid, and food imports on domestic food production in sub-Saharan Africa. It is found that agricultural input factors: fertilizers, arable lands devoted to domestic cereal production and the general productivity of the land under cultivation, exert the most significant impacts on domestic food production. On the other hand, the policy variables of interest: price control, food aid and food importation, were found to exert insignificant impacts. A major implication of these findings is that, in the short run, African governments may do well to concentrate their efforts in improving, enriching and expanding the arable lands devoted to domestic food production, other things being equal. Over the long term, innovative manpower development programs, especially those relating to women, and less dependence on the vagaries of climatic conditions, on food aid and food imports may become essential. In addition, African governments need to support their farmers with price incentives rather than price control.

Agricultural development in Southern Africa: Theory, lessons and the food crisis in Africa

In this paper a household economics theory of farm‐household production in the Southern African context is presented which (a) places a new interpretation on the causes of low productivity per person and unit of land in the African farming sector, (b) demonstrates that even where improved food crop technology is widely adopted it may have a very limited impact on marketed production, and (c) contributes to an understanding of why Africa's food production per person continues to fall despite per capita aid inflows which have exceeded those for any other continent over the last decade.

The Food Crisis and Agrarian Change in Africa: A Review Essay

Recent assessments of the performance and prospects of African economies portray a deepening economic crisis centered on the problem of food supplies. During the last ten years, a rapidly rising number of Africans have had an increasingly difficult time getting enough to eat. By all accounts, domestic food supplies are falling further and further behind domestic needs; both governments and consumers face serious problems in procuring the kinds and quantities of food they want at prices they can afford to pay. Chronic hunger and malnutrition are spreading, escalating quickly into famine at times of environmental or financial crisis. Covering food deficits from foreign sources has also become more difficult in the last decade. World prices of grains have risen; soaring petroleum prices have put heavy strains on many African countries' balances of payments and worsened their terms of trade; and agricultural exports have not increased sufficiently to cover rising import bills. Food aid to Africa has grown at unprecedented rates in the last decade, but it is neither adequate to meet shortterm needs, nor is it a solution to the crisis in the long run. The question to which this review will be primarily addressed is whether the food crisis in Africa is mainly a result of lagging or insufficient agricultural production or whether it is part of a larger crisis of economic management, reflected in chronic balance of payments deficits, rising foreign indebtedness, inflation, low productivity, corruption, waste, and deteriorating standards of living for all but a privileged few. For the most part international agencies, from the OAU to the World Bank, have attributed the crisis to declining or stagnant agricultural production brought about by government policies which discourage or inhibit agricultural growth. The analysis walks on two legs. First, aggregate production indices compiled by African governments and/or the international agencies themselves suggest that, in most of sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural output per capita has stagnated or even declined in recent years. Second, studies of development policy in several Asian and Latin American economies (Little et al., 1970) showed that strategies of import-substituting industrialization (widely practiced in the 1950s and 1960s) tend to discriminate against agriculture. After independence, African governments frequently adopted similar policies with, it is argued, similar results: in Africa's largely agrarian economies, the resulting decline in agricultural output (or growth) not only led to food shortages and mounting balance of payment deficits, but also undermined the entire process of economic development.

Facing up to Africa's Food Crisis

Facing up to Africa's Food Crisis