Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation

[13] Best Practices

[13] Best Practices While researching this book we repeatedly encountered two fundamental realities: (1) the degree of human suffering from chronic hunger and disease is shameful, getting worse, and expanding to include more people; and (2) this suffering is avoidable. How might we reverse this trend? There are, in fact, some excellent ideas that may serve as models for addressing the problems detailed in this book. We call these “best practices.” They are worth our consideration. We have placed them in four categories: food security, women and education, health care, and violence and conflict. This is not a comprehensive list, but it illustrates several things. First, it encourages us to do something about the problems set forth here. Second, it posits that some of the best models for addressing these problems are small in scale, comparatively inexpensive, and can be accomplished. Third, it shows that these models are successful because they are “targeted” and receive strong support, “inputs” (such as seeds, training, credit, and medicines), direct hands-on attention, and follow-up. And fourth, it reveals that the models employed come by working closely with the people in developing countries and are turned over to them. Food Security and Smallholder Farming Smallholder farmers produce much of the developing world’s food.1 They do this on small plots of land that produce enough for themselves, their families , and, when harvests allow, a little left over to sell or barter. Large numbers of Africa’s people derive their livelihood from agriculture, which employs between 61 percent and 80 percent of the labor force, depending on the country; the majority of Africa’s farmers are women. Agriculture contributes about 42 percent of the gross domestic product (gdp) of low-income African countries and 27 percent of the gdp of its middle-income countries; it accounts for between 40 percent and 60 percent of export earnings.2 But most of the employment and production come from commercial farms growing commodity crops for export instead of food for internal consumption. The challenge facing Africa’s agriculture is formidable. According to a World Bank report, Africa’s agriculture must over the next decades match the food demands of a growing population, maintain output per person, increase caloric intake, lower food imports and food aid needs, continue as Africa’s prin- Best Practices [] 269 cipal employer, and compete on global markets to earn foreign exchange to fuel economic growth. “And it must do all that while reversing the degradation of natural resources that threatens long-term production,” the World Bank states. “This challenge requires a transformation of agriculture”3 (italics added). To do this, Africa’s agriculture will have to continue commodity production and large-scale commercial farming, but it will also need to achieve and maintain food security and food self-sufficiency. Therefore, a paradigm shift is needed that would strengthen food security—that is, produce enough food to maintain health and productivity—and become self-sufficient in obtaining food. This will mean finding a better balance between smallholder and commercial farming. It will also mean addressing crop diversity and moving away from dependency on a single crop, such as maize, vulnerable to a “tragic environmental accident” similar to the potato blight. In addition increased regional food trade will need to become a central strategy by which food surpluses are moved as needed to nearby food-deficit countries. Food security and selfsufficiency also offer one way of addressing volatile world food trade markets. We have a possible “best practices” model in southern Africa currently in the productive farmlands of that region and within the 14-country Southern Africa Development Community. The standard accepted wisdom that “large farms are more efficient than small-holder farms” ignores the potential in smallholder farming. It has led to land-ownership and agricultural policies in sub-Saharan Africa that have favored land alienation and expropriation in favor of large commercial farms and government-owned estates, and the production of commodity crops exported to earn foreign currency. Could resources of every kind—seeds, technology, credit, farm implements, and market access—be redirected to Africa’s smallholders ? What might be the outcome? An excellent answer is found in an unlikely source: Zimbabwe. Using maize, Africa’s staple food, as its principal crop, Zimbabwe actually produced two maize revolutions. How did they do it? The first began during the colonial period when the country was a British colony (Southern Rhodesia). White commercial farmers, each farming up to 1500–2000 hectares of land, were...