By Virginia Muwanigwa – SANF 04 no 40
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has responded to increasing calls for a more sustainable and proactive approach to ensuring food security rather than depending on the short-term reactive appeal for food aid.
To this end, an extraordinary summit under the theme, “Enhancing agriculture and food security for poverty reduction in the SADC region,” will be held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on 15 May. The objective of the meeting is to agree on an action plan for regional cooperation to ensure food security.
Speaking at a Council of Ministers meeting in Arusha in March, the SADC Chairperson, Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa said he hoped the summit would “come up with firm decisions, and an action plan for implementation, on key factors to enhance agricultural productivity and food security.”
SADC, through its Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources (FANR) directorate, says the summit will review issues such as sustainable agricultural financing and investment; enhancing food production, productivity and overall availability and improving access to safe and nutritious food through rural non-farm income generation activities.
Other issues include strengthening disaster preparedness through the establishment of a regional food reserve facility, strengthening early warning systems and vulnerability monitoring capabilities; and mitigating impacts of HIV and AIDS on agriculture and food security.
The summit is a culmination of several preparatory meetings that also saw food, agriculture and natural resources ministers meeting in February in Dar es Salaam. That meeting recommended measures to address key challenges that will accelerate food production, guarantee food security and reduce poverty in the region.
Support for farmers to acquire modern technology to improve productivity needs innovative financing instruments that promote private and public resource mobilization.
In line with SADC’s objective to work with other stakeholders beyond government departments and politicians, opportunities exist for sharing of ideas and responsibilities with the private sector and civil society.
Increased trade in agricultural products, including at regional level is one strategy to ensure food security. Challenges exist for regional farmers in this area through “…denial of fair access to foreign markets due to the existing imbalances that weigh against the competitiveness of what they produce, to the overflow in our markets of subsidised farm exports from rich countries,” says President Mkapa.
The need to balance the growing of, and trade in, cash crops rather than food crops has also been noted. Governments have been urged to play a stronger role in ensuring that food supply is not left to market forces.
The summit will also assess progress toward member states’ pledge to commit “at least 10 percent of national budgetary resources” to agriculture and rural development within five years. SADC leaders made this pledge in July 2003, during the African Union Summit in Mozambique.
SADC has given high priority to agricultural development and food security in its long-term plan, the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP) launched by President Mkapa in March this year.
The 15-year strategic plan spells out the vision and priority areas of focus for regional integration in order to reduce poverty and promote broad-based economic and social development in the region.
RISDP focuses on a number of interrelated issues within agriculture, namely promoting food availability, access and utilization, emergency preparedness, and policy harmonization and coordination.
SADC countries have also adopted varying policies on land reform. The need to share information and best practices and review lessons learnt has been identified as one way of harmonising land reform policies and programmes. Access to land is one of the critical issues affecting food security in the region.
SADC has also acknowledged the need to have ongoing review of national food security policies. National planning on food security should feed into regional planning to enable better management of risks and vulnerability.
However, effective regional cooperation needs to go beyond early warning and address issues of natural resources, human resources and infrastructure. The SADC Secretariat is also exploring the possibility of creating a US$10-million “food reserve facility” to be supported by member states and the World Bank.
The reserve facility would build a grain reserve that member states can rely on, as well as a fund that can support other non-food requirements during periods of need. As of March 2004, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania and Zimbabwe were expected to have food deficits.
Vulnerability at household, national and regional level has also increased due to HIV and AIDS. The summit will therefore adopt strategies to mainstream HIV and AIDS into programmes designed to improve food security.
In the same way, the impending summit has a task to ensure, through effective intervention strategies, that immediate consumption needs of food insecure communities do not lead to unsustainable environmental degradation. (SARDC)
