Poverty and Food Insecurity in Afric

In sub-Saharan Africa, a large and increasing proportion of the population subsist on per capita income of less than one dollar a day. The share of the population falling below the poverty line is as high as 50 per cent. Although all indices of poverty are well manifested in sub-Saharan Africa’s Human Development Indices (World Bank 1999), the heart of the problem is food insecurity.  From statistical projections (Badiane and Delgado, 1995), aggregate cereals demand and supply balances for African countries indicate a likely increase in imports from 9 million metric tons in 1990 to 27 million metric tonnes by 2020. And given the obvious difficulties in mobilizing resources to finance imports and the implications on local food availability (IITA, 1993), deterioration in the food security will result, unless revolutionary departures are made from current production patterns.

Agriculture is not only the primary source of food in Africa; it is the principal means of livelihood in its predominant rural settlements. The challenges then are, not only to drastically reduce net import demands and make agriculture a major source of export earning, but more critically, to achieve agriculture-led industrialization towards the attainment of structural reforms as are called for by increasing world integration.  Although the problems are both policy-induced and structural in nature, our concern is on the structural challenges that tend to constrain the desired social and economic transformation of agriculture and that reinforce poverty and food insecurity.