Hunger In Africa Research Articles

War in foreign lands, hunger at home

The war between Russia and Ukraine pitted two major agricultural countries and threatened the African continent with food insecurity and hunger. The war came at a time when the world was emerging from another global challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant effects of distorted food prices and disruptions of the food supply chain. Informed by the analysis of the literature available on the Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar databases and grey literature from United Nations (UN) agencies, this study explores the challenges that emanated from the global problem of conflict and its implications on food security and the fight against hunger in Africa. The study found that the Russo-Ukrainian war exposed the lack of progress in Africa towards the fight to eliminate hunger. The consequences of the war have been aggravated by this lack of progress towards achieving zero hunger in many African countries. The war disrupted the global supply chain and threatened Africa with hunger as the continent experienced food shortages, food inflation and general commodity price volatility.

Evaluating Food Production Shocks and Their Effects on Population Growth and Hunger in Africa

Evaluating Food Production Shocks and Their Effects on Population Growth and Hunger in Africa

Globalization and the “zero hunger” goal in Africa: Starving in an open world?

AbstractDespite commendable efforts to end hunger and achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2, the prevalence of undernourishment is still inadmissibly high, especially in Africa. Though important determinants of undernourishment have been documented, little is known about the role of globalization. This paper aims to fill this gap using a sample of 48 African countries over 2000–2020 period and data from the KOF globalization index and the World Bank dataset. The results from Driscoll and Kraay's Standard Errors and Instrumental Variable Generalized Method of Moments (IVGMM) methods show that globalization reduces both the prevalence of undernourishment and child stunting in African countries. Accounting for the dimensions of globalization, the results show that while economic globalization is negatively associated with food security, social and political globalization enhances it. Moreover, income growth, government size and access to electricity are identified as channels through which globalization reduces hunger in Africa. African governments should develop evidence‐based policies and interventions that leverage the opportunities presented by globalization to ensure food security.

Does corruption starve Africa? The mitigating effect of political distribution of power

Corruption remains a major challenge to sustainable economic growth, good governance, peace, and stability in both developed and developing countries. However, in developing countries, and particularly in Africa, hunger is another big challenge to inclusive economic development. To date, no empirical study has examined the effects of different types of corruption on hunger. Using three types of corruption (executive, legislative, and judicial corruption dynamics) and a panel of 45 African countries, this study contributes to the literature on the effects of corruption by examining, as a first attempt, the impact of types of corruption on hunger. We address the weak time-variance of our main regressors by using the most recent sequential linear panel dynamic estimator. The results show that countries with higher levels of executive, legislative, and judicial corruption are associated with a higher level of hunger. Moreover, the results show that executive corruption is the most disastrous for hunger in Africa, followed by legislative corruption. Our results remain valid even after using alternative measures of the key variables (hunger and corruption) and after controlling for the dynamic endogeneity using the generalized method of moments. Further analysis provides strong evidence that the political distribution of power across social groups mitigates the effect of corruption on hunger.

Achieving the “zero hunger” goal in Africa: Beyond the direct effects of infrastructure development

AbstractThe relevance of the worldwide commitment to end hunger as stated in Sustainable Development Goal 2.1 makes it crucial to understand the trend of undernourishment and the accompanying determinants that are still underexplored. Using a sample of 41 African countries covering the 2003–2019 period, this paper contributes to the literature by examining the direct and indirect effects of infrastructure development on the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU). Findings from the system generalized method of moments show that infrastructure development (including ICT, water and sanitation, transport, and electricity) significantly reduces the PoU and child stunting. Interestingly, the causal mediation analysis reveals that human capital, governance, and economic growth are the main channels through which infrastructure development reduces hunger in Africa. Among policy implications, the development of reliable infrastructures remains a prerequisite for attaining the “zero hunger” goal in Africa.

Implications of Land Grabbing and Resource Curse for Sustainable Development Goal 2 in Africa: Can Globalization Be Blamed?

Globalization, as described by Joseph Stiglitz in his books Globalization and its Discontents and Making Globalization Work, draws on both pains and gains. These two seemingly incompatible positions, where globalization is used as a platform to partner or collaborate with other countries by grabbing lands for sustainable developmental initiatives such as the attainment of SDG 2, but ends up dispossessing the host communities of their lands, form the crux of this paper. Although not all land grabbing is illegal, especially if lands are leased within the confines of a country’s land tenure laws, the reality in some African countries shows that lands are grabbed without following land tenure laws. This partly limits the capacity of African countries to effectively control and monitor the activities of foreign land grabbers or investors on leased lands. This loophole in the governance of arable lands in Africa has made many foreign partners use Africa’s arable lands for their own benefit at the expense of Africa’s food sovereignty initiative. It has partly made Africa appear to be a resource-cursed region, where it can hardly feed its population despite its global partnerships and huge land resources. Drawing on systematic desktop reviews of the literature, this study asks if globalization is contributing to Africa’s hunger index and resource curse. The findings expand the discussion on how Africa is still not able to feed its population and end hunger, despite the potential offered by globalization. It suggests approaches through which Africa can optimize globalization in ways that support determined efforts at ending hunger in Africa.

The Relevance of Human Security Approach in Assessing The Causes and Solutions to Food Insecurity in South Sudan (Case Study: South Sudan 2017 Famine)

The Relevance of Human Security Approach in Assessing The Causes and Solutions to Food Insecurity in South Sudan (Case Study: South Sudan 2017 Famine)

Review of Impact of Climate Change on Food Security in Africa

Food Security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. African continent is found to be the most susceptible and vulnerable places to climate change impacts, which is marked as the most food insecure region in the world, because of its reliance on climate sensitive and vulnerable economic sectors (rain fed agriculture) and its lower financial, technical, and technological capacity to adapt the climate change risks, and climate change is considered as posing the greatest threat to agriculture production and food security in the 21st century, particularly, in many of the poor, agriculture-based countries of Africa. Climate change affects food security in various ways: through impacting on all four components of food security (availability, accessibility, affordability, utilization and nutritional value and food system stability), through impacting on crop production and yield, through impacting on water availability, through impacting on fisheries production, through impacting on agricultural pests (weed, insect and disease pests), and through impacting on livestock production. African continent specially, Sub-Saharan African region is found to be the most drought prone area in the World. The severity of climate change extreme events/or drought induced food insecurity and malnutrition in Africa is emphasized. In Africa, food insecurity and malnutrition became chronic induced by repeatedly occurring drought. Due to climate change extreme event/or drought drive food crises/hunger many Africans were badly affected For instance, more than 100 million people were affected by drought driven hunger in Africa. So, Africa especially, Sub-Saharan Africa is marked as the most food insecure region in the world, and has the highest proportion of food insecure people, with an estimated regional average of 26.8% of the population undernourished and this rates could be over 50%. Moreover, the risk of hunger will increase by 10-20% in 2050. Similarly, in Africa, due to climate change impacts, the number of malnourished children is projected to be increased in 2030 and 2050 from the baseline (33 million) to 42 million and 52 million respectively. Thus, climate change impacts on food security has to be taken as key issue and impact reduction strategy options have to be implemented. Keywords: Impact of climate change, food security, malnutrition, food insecurity DOI: 10.7176/JRDM/90-03 Publication date: January 31 st 2023

Food Security and Safety: Africans Perspectives A Review

The challenges of hunger in Africa, caused by food insecurity can only be mitigated by enhanced food security and food safety measures. Food safety has a significant role in ensuring food security. A primary cause of food insecurity is the decline in global food productivity. It is also a problem of poverty which has impacted adversely on the socio-economic life of its citizens. Africa is endowed with land resource that if transformed towards agricultural productivity has the capacity to ensure food security and sustainability. Agriculture, of which 85-90 per cent is rain-fed in sub-Saharan Africa, accounts for 35 percent of the region’s gross national product (GNP), 40 percent of exports and 70 percent of employment. Africa needs to leverage on agricultural innovation so as to boost its regional food output. It is essential that production and provision of safe food be given the attention it deserves by addressing the numerous challenges facing it so as to stimulate economic growth and ensure food security and safety in the African continent.

Food security prediction from heterogeneous data combining machine and deep learning methods

After many years of decline, hunger in Africa is growing again. This represents a global societal issue that all disciplines concerned with data analysis are facing. The rapid and accurate identification of food insecurity situations is a complex challenge. Although a number of food security alert and monitoring systems exist in food insecure countries, the data and methodologies they are based on do not allow for comprehending food security in all its complexity. In this study, we focus on two key food security indicators: the food consumption score (FCS) and the household dietary diversity score (HDDS). Based on the observation that producing such indicators is expensive in terms of time and resources, we propose the FSPHD (Food Security Prediction based on Heterogeneous Data) framework, based on state-of-the-art machine and deep learning models, to enable the estimation of FCS and HDDS starting from publicly available heterogeneous data. We take into account the indicators estimated using data from the Permanent Agricultural Survey conducted by the Burkina Faso government from 2009 to 2018 as reference data. We produce our estimations starting from heterogeneous data that include rasters (e.g., population density, land use, soil quality), GPS points (hospitals, schools, violent events), line vectors (waterways), quantitative variables (maize prices, World Bank variables, meteorological data) and time series (Smoothed Brightness Temperature — SMT, rainfall estimates, maize prices). The experimental results show a promising performance of our framework, which outperforms competing methods, thus paving the way for the development of advanced food security prediction systems based on state-of-the-art data science technologies.

The rise and fall of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition: a tale of two discourses

The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NAFSN) was launched in 2012 by the G7 countries as a major initiative to fight hunger in Africa. It promised to raise 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years by brokering pro-market reforms and flows of private capital to African agriculture. However, it failed to fulfil its promises and disappeared quietly from the public arena before the end of the 10-year period. This article applies critical discourse analysis to official US and French documents to examine the rise and fall of the initiative by confronting the discourses of the NAFSN and food security in the official US and French documents. The USA was the leading country, whereas France was a reluctant supporter and withdrew in 2018. The US discourse strongly promoted the neo-productivist food security paradigm embedded in techno-optimist and neoliberal solutions. By contrast, French framing leaned towards the agroecology paradigm, admittedly combined with the smallholder commercialisation perspective, which is itself remarkable for discourse at such a high policy level. We relate these divergences to the dialectical contradictions in the current global food system in terms of the tensions within the corporate/neoliberal food regime. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.1917355 .

Rice and Climate Change: It’s Significance towards Achieving Food Security in Nigeria: A Review

Climate change is already impacting on every aspect of man life on earth especially in the agricultural sectors of developing nations. In Nigeria, and indeed the world over, seasons are shifting, temperatures are rising, landscapes are changing and sea levels are rising. Extreme weather events like drought and flood are becoming more frequent and pronounced.[3] stressed on the fact that Agriculture will suffer from major damage caused by changes in climate especially in the African continent. Nigeria is one of the African country that is highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, as Nigeria is still practicing rain fed agriculture [16]. The impact of climate change is experienced in form of extreme climatic events like flooding, severe heats, and droughts which has led to the degradation of soil and consequently low yield in crops. This will have consequences for rice cultivation in Nigeria, where the dominating climatic factor relied on by farmers in the choice of when to prepare the land for planting, the actual planting,the types of crop variety to plant and harvesting of crop is rainfall [23, 24].The implication of this will be interference with food security as rice is an essential food crop in Nigeria that is consumed by a large number of the population. [26] has warned that hunger in Africa will be worsen by adverse effects of climate change, as it threatens the capacity of vulnerable countries like Nigeria to guarantee food security, eradicate poverty and actualize sustainable development in agriculture. The increasing rate of inadequacy in food supply in the world leading to different form of malnutrition is worrisome and more needs to be done in the areas of agriculture so as to guarantee food security to some extent and improve on nourishment, if a world without hunger is to be achieved by 2030.

Ending Hunger in Africa: The Elimination of Hunger and Food Insecurity on the African Continent by 2025 - Conditions for Success

Ending Hunger in Africa: The Elimination of Hunger and Food Insecurity on the African Continent by 2025 - Conditions for Success

Response to Claudio Schuftan on “Three decades of fighting against hunger in Africa: Progress, challenges and opportunities”

Response to Claudio Schuftan on “Three decades of fighting against hunger in Africa: Progress, challenges and opportunities”

Mycorrhizal Interventions for Sustainable Potato Production in Africa

The potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is an important tuber crop with high dietary value that could potentially help to alleviate malnutrition and hunger in Africa. However, production is expensive, with high fertilizer and pesticide demands that lead to environmental pollution, and tillage practices that negatively affect soil structure. Microorganisms of different types have increasingly been found to be useful as biofertilizers, and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are an important crop symbiont. AM fungi have been shown to increase tolerance of crop plants to drought, salinity and disease by facilitating water and nutrient acquisition and by improving overall soil structure. However, the establishment and maintenance of the symbioses are greatly affected by agricultural practices. Here, we review the benefits that AM fungi confer in potato production, discuss the role and importance of mycorrhiza helper bacteria, and focus on how AM fungal diversity and abundance can be affected by conventional agricultural practices, such as those used in potato production. We suggest approaches for maintaining AM fungal abundance in potato production by highlighting the potential of conservation tillage practices augmented with cover crops and crop rotations. An approach that balances weed control, nutrient provision, and AM fungal helper bacterial populations, whilst promoting functional AM fungal populations for varying potato genotypes, will stimulate efficient mycorrhizal interventions.

Challenges and innovations in achieving zero hunger and environmental sustainability through the lens of sub-Saharan Africa

Achieving zero hunger by 2030 often raises the issue of environmental protection or sustainable social development among policy makers due to the environmental footprint of intensifying agricultural production across the continent. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has one of the fastgrowing populations with more than half of the global growth between now and 2050. The challenge now lies in feeding the ever-growing population that is exerting pressure on the limited available resources. Doubling the agricultural productivity of small-scale farmers by 2030 (SDG 2.3) remains a daunting task for researcher and policy makers to address on the continent that now relies much on imports of food. Exploitation of the untapped massive land resources for agricultural production poses threats to sustainability. However, the challenges of global warming cannot be left out of this discussion since it has direct impact on future productivity on the continent. Climate change that has been projected to mostly affect the poorer countries also present trials to the food system through increased diseases and weather extremes of floods and droughts. Questions are yet to be answered on which tradeoffs and synergies if any need to be made to achieve zero hunger in Africa by 2030. This synopsis critically breaks down the conflicts, tradeoffs and synergies of how a continent with such massive agricultural production potential can navigate sustainably to achieve zero hunger, self-sufficiency and exports prospects while conserving the environment and natural resources. Evident deployment of new and improved technologies especially advanced biotechnology tools will be critical in achieving zero hunger by 2030. The adaptation needs of the continent are broad including institutional, social, physical and infrastructural needs, ecosystem services and environmental needs, and financial and capacity uncertain impacts.

Three decades of fighting against hunger in Africa: Progress, challenges and opportunities

Tackling hunger is a challenge for many African governments because of its endemic nature on the continent. Many African countries have found it difficult to achieve significant reductions in hunger and malnutrition since 1990. In this paper, we review the progress of African countries in the fight against hunger over the past three decades, using the Global Hunger Index (GHI) scores. Ghana had the best GHI improvement (-53.1%) while Zimbabwe and Central African Republic had slightly increased GHI scores (+1.6%). Within this time period, few countries had significant reductions in their GHI scores, while some suffered increases. Furthermore, in assessing the three indicators of GHI: (i) prevalence of undernourishment (percent population), (ii) prevalence of stunting in children (%) and (iii) prevalence of wasting in children (%), we found that no country in Africa was able to achieve all three targets. Six countries (Tunisia, Ghana, South Africa, Morocco, Mauritius and Algeria) were able to achieve targets for two of these while the majority achieved only one. We present country-level evidence of clear links between GHI scores with score for human development, social protection and terrorism. Some challenges that made the zero hunger target a difficult task in Africa are reviewed while opportunities for moving the continent towards the zero-hunger target by 2030 are also explored.

Crop yield gap and yield convergence in African countries

Raising crop yield per unit land area remains a key to eliminating food shortages given limited land resources. However, Africa still falls far behind other continents in crop yield and there is major variation across regions within Africa. This paper analyzed regional yield gaps and yield convergence in Africa for four major crops: maize, millets, sorghum, and cassava. The club convergence test was employed to test whether yields are converging in Africa. Our results found no evidence of population convergence as a whole for any of the crops. However, we found that crop yields are converging into several clubs or groups of countries, implying successful technology diffusion and use within, but not between, specific regions. Furthermore, we predicted the attainable output for the four crops based on club convergence using the highest actual yield in each club as the attainable yield for all countries in the same club, and found that the gap between actual output and attainable output is narrowing gradually. Nevertheless, actual output could still increase by 70% if all countries reached the yield frontier, which we defined as the highest actual yield in each club. We suggest that policies aiming to end hunger in Africa should focus on eliminating barriers to technology diffusion and use of agricultural support mechanisms between countries, particularly those in the same club.

IT IS NOT ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY; WELFARE IT IS ABOUT RIGHTS

We assume that the undernourishment or starvation continued in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) because there the misery persisted. Poverty reduction is the only way to the end hunger in Africa. Also, for an agricultural country in SSA the best way to solve the problem of poverty is through agricultural development. Our analysis is based upon a sample of nine countries in SSA, so called SSA – 9. SSA has around 47,5 percent of rural population in extreme poverty while between 1990 and 2005 when food prices were stable and low, extreme rural poverty in SSA involved around 64.6 percent of population. Thus, we have built up a model trying to answer to the question of how the agricultural gears in SSA – 9 were moving between 1990 and 2005 and assess how the agricultural growth could reduce rural poverty. We used a system of recursive rather than simultaneous equations: a recursive model is a special case of an equation system where the endogenous variables are determined one at a time in sequence. The most important result is that the main tools that had a strong relation with poverty reduction in SSA – 9 were legislation on property rights (PR), access to the credit system, Human capital and infrastructure.

Agricultural investments and hunger in Africa modeling potential contributions to SDG2 - Zero Hunger.

We use IFPRI's IMPACT framework of linked biophysical and structural economic models to examine developments in global agricultural production systems, climate change, and food security. Building on related work on how increased investment in agricultural research, resource management, and infrastructure can address the challenges of meeting future food demand, we explore the costs and implications of these investments for reducing hunger in Africa by 2030. This analysis is coupled with a new investment estimation model, based on the perpetual inventory methodology (PIM), which allows for a better assessment of the costs of achieving projected agricultural improvements. We find that climate change will continue to slow projected reductions in hunger in the coming decades-increasing the number of people at risk of hunger in 2030 by 16 million in Africa compared to a scenario without climate change. Investments to increase agricultural productivity can offset the adverse impacts of climate change and help reduce the share of people at risk of hunger in 2030 to five percent or less in Northern, Western, and Southern Africa, but the share is projected to remain at ten percent or more in Eastern and Central Africa. Investments in Africa to achieve these results are estimated to cost about 15 billion USD per year between 2015 and 2030, as part of a larger package of investments costing around 52 billion USD in developing countries.