ZAMBIA AND ZIMBABWE ARE TWO COUNTRIES in the Southern Africa region. Earlier in the century, they both suffered serious climate events that impacted on their food production and food security. Both countries are fast urbanising and the growing populations means more mouths to feed. But both countries have had to depend on food donations from caring donors for well over a decade before the new millennium. The period from 2000 to 2002 was a defining moment as famine threatened these two countries and some other neighbouring countries to the extent that they had to depend on hand out from caring countries that saw the virtue in giving to help the helpless. Thus a regional population that was no fewer than 33 million people then saw help in the horizon.
The help was, however, rejected – especially by Zimbabwe and Zambia in the main and some other neighbouring countries in effect. Levy Mwanawasa – president of Zambia – rejected the genetically modified (GM) corn donation from the United States (US) through the World Food Programme (WFP) of the United Nations. Zambia turned down the GM food aid after sending scientists to do assessment. Despite that, President Mwanawasa still referred to the food as “poison,” preferring rather that his countrymen and women faced starvation. Mwanawasa said government was going to continue to refuse corn that may be genetically modified, despite looming famine. About twenty years after, climate-induced disruptions like droughts still threaten to destabilise households in particular and the country’s economy in general. A major cause of Zambia’s food crisis could well be attributed to bad governance stemming from poor policies.
Infrequent but high impact weather events of varying magnitudes have beaten the region of Southern Africa, endangering the lives of millions of people, mostly dependent on agriculture. The calls, urging the Zambian government to declare a food emergency amid the worst droughts in nearly four decades did not seem to have received the deserved official attention or positive action ever since. As recently as the 2019/2020 rainy season, Zambia recorded above normal rainfall which resulted into flooding in some places and dry spells in isolated parts of the country. In 2019, Zambia felt part of the flooding resulting from Cyclones Idai and Kenneth that devastated Mozambique early in that year, followed by prolonged drought later that year. In 2002, the drought stricken neighbouring Zimbabwe equally rejected GM corn donation initially. Zimbabwe’s subsequent acceptance of food aid containing GMO was on condition that it was going to be milled before distribution to prevent the possible diversion for planting by farmers. While Eswatini (Swaziland) and Lesotho accepted the GM maize, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe insisted it was milled into flour, so that farmers cannot plant them. Government policies therefore stood in the way of food aid, compounding the food insecurity in the region for so long.
Every country in Africa is home to many national agricultural research stations funded and controlled by the government of the country, in addition to four out of the 15 CGIAR research centres globally. The centres, otherwise known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, include the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in Nairobi, International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) also in Nairobi but co-hosted by Kenya and Ethiopia. The other two are the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria, and the African Rice Centre in Ivory Coast. While the CGIAR centres exist alongside the national agricultural research institutes, otherwise called NARIs, both of them operate in Africa under huge policy and funding constraints that severely limit their impacts. The impacts of the 15 NARIs in Nigeria are hardly felt because of the disposition of government. The CGIAR centres are also circumscribed by dwindling financial supports, thus limiting their scope of coverage and duration of implementation. Many of the technologies the CGIAR centres promote could not get widespread adoption because of the failure of national governments to support their works. Their ultimate impacts on food security are thus limited.
Under the Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s “fast-track” land reform, Zimbabwe’s government expropriated the lands of white farmers without compensation or reimbursement. The Zimbabwe’s former dictator tacitly supported his paramilitary supporters to invade commercial farms mostly owned by the whites, thus depriving the white farmers of rights to agricultural lands. This was to gain political capital locally. Two decades on, it was only last year that Zimbabwe agreed to pay $3.5 billion in compensation to white farmers whose land was expropriated by the government to resettle black families. Reports are rife that Zimbabwe, with an already battered economy, still hasn’t got the money and will issue long term bonds, jointly approaching international donors with the farmers to raise funding, according to the compensation agreement. Bad governance under Mugabe plunged Zimbabwe into food crisis, as in Zambia under Levy Mwanawasa. Apart from Zimbabwe and Zambia, a tardy response to agricultural technologies has characterised most African countries, notwithstanding the diverse production challenges they encounter.
Diversity conservation has suffered serious neglect, leading to losses in biodiversity that in turn impact on food security as well as on climate change. There are micro-level and macro-level of manifestation of climate change resulting from biodiversity losses. At the micro-level, many changes appear easier to tackle while those at the macro-level are sometimes intractable as a result of politics and governance failures. For the NARIs and CGIAR centres, there is very little they can do outside advisory services, especially when the government of a country does not seem well disposed to utilising the knowledge emanating from these centres’ research works. Poor yielding crop varieties, with lower yield per hectare, tend to fail to meet the food security expectations of an affected country. Knee jerk policy reactions to crises usually ignore the body of knowledge available within the agriculture research systems, leaving such countries – and most are in this category – backward and severely challenged.
Drought resistance crops have experienced low adoption in some environmentally challenged and drought-prone areas where they are most needed. This increases people’s vulnerability to hunger and famine in extreme cases. There is now a tendency to reduction in rainfall intensity and inadequate water for irrigation. Water levels of major rivers are now perennially low, just as rainfall data in terms of depth and number of days has been severely low in some selected countries. Zambezi river is drying up and that means much for southern Africa. Kenya, Senegal, Namibia, Western Cape in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Niger Republic, Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan are severely challenged in water availability, with some instances of flooding intervening between prolonged droughts. Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia – three neighbouring countries – are now at daggers drawn because of the Grand Renaissance Ethiopian Dam (GERD). While Ethiopia dismisses the fears expressed by Egypt and Sudan on the filling of the dam, the other two countries are apprehensive about the impact on their livelihoods, economies and biodiversity.
The wide body of knowledge available to African farmers have not been significantly put to use. For instance, it has been scientifically demonstrated by agricultural research scientists that pests and diseases such as Cassava Mosaic Virus, Maruca in beans or Sigatoka in banana have been put under control. But, if only these technologies will be widely adopted and used, Uganda, for instance, should have overflowing banana and plantain harvests. DR Congo, Mozambique or Nigeria should be exporting cassava. The crisis of pests and diseases has severely limited African country’s chances of attaining food security. At about 2016 and 2017, fall army worm devastated many maize farms in eastern, western and southern Africa, with far reaching food security consequences. This was in addition to the poor yield in corn and other crops. Post-harvest food wastage has become very common, with an estimated 40 per cent of all harvested staples going into waste annually. Yet, it is not that these problems are insurmountable, but the political will to empower farmers and agro-processors has been largely absent. At the height of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, countries in East Africa, including Ethiopia and Uganda, were ravaged by locust invasion that further dimmed the opportunities of feeding the vulnerable in that region.
Agriculture contributes to more than two thirds of employment in Kenya and yet over 80 per cent of Kenya’s land is arid or semi-arid, and farming is constrained by low and erratic rainfall. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a branch of the World Bank and member of the World Bank Group, focused exclusively on the private sector in developing countries, is bringing an innovative solution to bear in addressing the resulting chronic food insecurity. IFC, through the Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF), has provided grants and technical support to implementing partners to develop weather index insurance products to protect smallholder farmers and pastoralists’ assets. But its coverage has so far been limited. It was reported that the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture implemented one of GIIF’s first weather index insurance pilot projects in Kenya in 2010 with 200 farmers. Two and a half years later, Syngenta’s Kilimo Salama – meaning ‘safe agriculture’ in Swahili – has sold eight weather index products to 53,000 farmers in Kenya, and expanded operations in 2012 to Rwanda, covering 21,000 farmers by late 2012. In 2018, IFC was in Nigeria to promote the index insurance innovation, but there are yet no evidences that the impact of the training went beyond the Abuja Transcorp Hilton Hotel where many white collar corporate insurance officers attended the week-long training.
National governments in Africa need to come to the realisation that food security cannot be achieved on autopilot. Proper policy formulation and implementation, with robust partnerships with research centres, donor agencies, other knowledge repertoire and finance agencies need to be brought together to achieve food security. The grave portents of ignoring these or handling them frivolously will increase tensions in countries and threaten the governments’ stability. After the COVID-19 scourge, African countries need to establish strategies for ensuring a food secure continent. And that can only be done when and if the political leaders grasp the enormity of challenges and rise up to tackle them.
