Quality of Life Issues for Developing Africa

The changes needed, say experts, are for the government to restrain the food industry by taxing fizzy drinks/fast food, removing vending machines from schools and taking junk food out of hospitals and government offices. And you and me need to cut down on portions! (However, all of this is a really tough challenge for in a recent study conducted across 22 countries it was found that for every advertisement for healthy foods there were four promoting unhealthy foods!)

At the same time we should try leaving our cars at home more and walk or cycle to our intended destination. The average car journey is only 8 miles with 25% of these journeys less than a mile. And for those already using public buses why not start by walking to the next bus stop and then, in a week, the next one after that! (Taxes on red meat could also be considered for that would reduce consumption, improve diets, reduce greenhouse gases from livestock and lead to the freeing up of more land for crops.)

Being overweight, it seems, is now becoming more prevalent in the developing world too. According to the Overseas Development Institute the number of obese and overweight adults in the South has almost quadrupled in the last 30 years to around 900m which added to those in the North means that one quarter of the world's population is now overweight.

However, it is the often acute food shortages in the South that should be given priority.

To start with surplus food supplies from the North urgently need to made available to countries where there are desperate shortages. Politics should not be played with hunger and starving people need immediate help. But this should not be seen as a permanent solution as shipping food will not improve the prospects of the world's hopelessly poor, three quarters of whom live in rural areas.

At the same time governments in developing countries need to allocate more than the current 6% of their national budgets to agriculture. In 2003, in the Maputo Declaration, African leaders committed to allocating 10% of their national budgets to agriculture. However, fifteen years on just 7 countries - Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guinea, Malawi, Mali, Niger, and Senegal - have reached or exceeded the 10% target whilst 9 countries - Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Congo Republic, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania - have reached growth in agriculture of more than 6% p.a. And so still today in Africa, bizarrely, even with an average of 6% of national budgets allocated to agriculture more money is wasted on defence on a continent where almost 75% of the population is engaged in subsistence farming.

Even with this huge presence on the land, food security continues to remain elusive with many farmers barely able to produce enough food for their own families never mind having any left over to sell. Yet Africa's farmers, who are mainly women working on tiny plots, could grow approximately three times more food if they had more government support in gaining access to essential inputs: fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and access to local agricultural expertise. And this would not only be a good investment in farming it would also help reduce Africa's annual food import bill of US$35bn on the continent with the largest amount of rain-fed uncultivated land. Moreover, as 65% of agricultural land in Africa is degraded, being allowed access to genetically modified (GM) seeds would also make an enormous difference to food production whilst cutting down on toxic pesticide sprays. Currently, however, due to the machinations of the European Union, green campaign groups and many churches, the advent of GM crops is all too often resisted by those in authority in Africa.

Farmers also suffer from not owning their own land which makes it impossible for them to put up security in order to borrow money to help bring about improvements. As such, one of the first tasks for governments and state authorities in the South should be to try to work to vest every farmer in the title to his/her own land. In this way the home/farm could be used as security to borrow money for better seeds, fertilisers, tools and machinery which would lead to a big increase in crop production. However, native customs, where all tribal land is vested in the chief, can make this a challenge in many parts of Africa.

Farmers could also be encouraged to amalgamate their small plots into co-operatives. (Currently 80% of farms in sub-Saharan Africa are smallholder-family concerns performing at about 40% of their potential) Co-operatives would allow machinery to be bought making life easier for those working the land. In turn this should boost production leaving larger profits to be shared according to the size of land contributed and the hours of work put in. Having certificates of ownership in a co-operative would also allow other farmers to join in and allow those wanting out the means to do so. Coming together like this would also help those families where the bread winner is no longer there or incapable of work. It would also allow children to get back to school instead of having to work in the fields in order to help their families maintain food production. (According to experts growth in agriculture is up to 11 times more effective at reducing poverty than increases in any other sector. Also 60% of the world's unused agricultural land lies in Africa.)

The main cause of food shortages in poor countries is usually blamed by governments on drought but all too often this can be used as an excuse. Nobody disputes that hunger is aggravated by bad weather but according to a blog from IFPRI in July 2017 'ending famines and chronic hunger requires good governance.' For example, in many parts of Africa water is readily available in countries lacking in food but too many governments either through neglect, alternative priorities, incompetence or lack of finance are not using the water resources available.

Take Ethiopia, for example. Until recently, water from the Ethiopian Highlands, and the huge expanse of Lake Tana, was hardly tapped at all by a government more concerned about arguing over a worthless town in a useless piece of desert on its border with Eritrea. This was apparently considered more important than encouraging farmers to move to more fertile parts of the country where irrigation channels, bore-holes and wells could be constructed to provide water for all their needs. Thankfully this is all about to change with the completion of the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, an impressive hydropower project, which will be the continent's largest. Similar potential lies in the Congo River if the will is there!

Transport is also a problem. A recent World Bank study found that high transport costs in Africa were driven just as much by poor regulations as by bad roads. (Only 16% of roads in Africa are paved.) Current regulations impose substantial barriers to entry thus allowing existing transport companies to maintain a monopoly and charge high prices.

Joined-up government is essential for moving food supplies within a country. And here again Ethiopia suffered from government inertia in the past. A combination of poor communication, inefficiency and corruption across the country meant that even in good years surplus food lay rotting in one part of the country whilst people starved in another. But even when the message did get through there were few roads in Ethiopia and most of them were potholed big time. So moving grain around the country could be perilous and costly as can be seen from the experience of one enterprising grain merchant who tried to take a truck load of grain from the south to the hungry north of the country.

The journey of 900k (560 miles) meant 17 days on the road to reach his destination. In that time he was stopped 10 times by local officials whom he had to bribe in order to be allowed to move on. And at the end of his ordeal he found that the roads had been so rough that many of his grain sacks had burst open. However, his problems didn't end there. Selling in Ethiopia was also made hazardous by the fact that there was no legal system to enforce contracts and very few traders had bank accounts. As a result vendors could only sell for cash and buyers had to inspect and weigh every bag of grain to ensure that they hadn't been cheated. So as he couldn't find a trustworthy trader prepared to pay in cash he finished up literally giving what was left of his load away. Needless to say that grain merchant is unlikely to undertake such a journey again.

At one time more than 20 million Ethiopians were still facing chronic food shortages but this is changing. In 2010 large-scale public and private investments in agricultural research and the promotion of fertilizer use led to substantial gains in cereal production and the availability of food. At the same time infrastructure investments such as improving and expanding road networks are helping to effectively move crops from farms to markets. Together these investments have helped smallholder farm households to achieve higher yields and production, raising their incomes and access to food. Additional programmes including terrace building to reduce soil erosion and education on nutrition have also helped stave off hunger. (Ethiopia is the birthplace of Arabica coffee which tends to be grown in the cool, humid highlands. With temperatures steadily rising in Ethiopia this is now damaging the crop forcing new plantations to be created on higher ground where the climate is cooler and wetter. Ethiopia is the 5th largest coffee producer in the world employing 15 million farmers and makes up a quarter of the country's export earnings.)

However, often exacerbating the food situation in Africa are foreign governments and large international corporations, mainly from India, the Orient and the Gulf, seeking prime agricultural land to grow food for their own people back home. And African governments, it seems, are more than ready to oblige. At the forefront here again is Ethiopia where it is estimated that the government has leased or sold 10 million acres of prime farmland to foreign investors since 2008. In order to achieve this the government has forcefully removed tens of thousands of people, with no compensation, onto marginal land where they are left to fend for themselves. And there they continue to eke out a living whilst fruit and vegetables worth an estimated US$250m per year are exported. So the government may have upped food production in Ethiopia but at the expense of many farming families.

Other countries which have already leased/sold land to foreign entities include Sudan with 4 million hectares, DRC 2.8m, Mozambique 2.7m, Mali 2.0m, Zambia 2.0m, Cameroon 2.0m, Liberia 1.6m, Benin 1.2m, Sierra Leone 1.1m with many of the deals going through at rock-bottom prices. And in the cases of Benin and Sierra Leone Oxfam calculates these figures represent 34% and 32% respectively of total agricultural land in these countries.

African governments should have laid down certain conditions before ceding land to foreign entities:-
1. all of the people whose land was requisitioned should have been compensated and given alternative land.
2. 90% of those employed on each project should be locals.
3. 50% of the food produced should remain in the country.

It could be argued, however, that the selling of land to foreigners helped to dispose of one government in Africa. In March, 2009, in Madagascar, Andre Rajoelina overthrew the government of Marc Ravalomanana after he promised to lease half the fertile land in the country to Daewoo, the South Korean conglomerate.

All of this means that food aid will continue to be important if mass starvation is to be prevented, not just in Africa, but around the world. In 2021 WFP undertook the largest operation in its history targeting 140m people as it responded to conflict - still the biggest driver of hunger - climate crises, the economic consequences of Covid 19, and rising costs. In 2020 the WFP was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the work of the WFP staff who lay their lives on the line every day to bring food and assistance to those in need.

In 2000 all the nations of the world signed up to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of halving world poverty levels of 1990 by 2015. Included in these targets were the aims to halve the proportion of people without safe water and adequate sanitation which are arguably the toughest challenges of all. Between 1990 and 2010 2bn people gained access to improved drinking water sources, such as piped supplies and protected wells, which means that the UN MDG target of halving the proportion of people without clean water was reached well before 2015. However, the world was nowhere near reaching the UN MDG target of 75% for sanitation as only 65% of the world currently has improved sanitation.

At the same time though the story was quite different for sub-Saharan Africa. A study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that only a handful of countries there met the target for clean water whilst not one country achieved the MDG goal in sanitation. These conclusions suggest this part of the world will not reach the 2015 MDG target for water until 2040 and for sanitation it will take another 2 centuries! And this was only halving the 1990 figures. At this rate universal access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa will take until late into the 21st century and for sanitation until the 24th century. And by then it is not impossible that humans may well be living on other planets - having first found water there of course!

Safe local water sources and sanitation then have to be prioritised for together they bring FOUR additional benefits to people's lives - better health, children will spend more time at school, more food can be grown which means that families have greater resources. So whatever way you look at it clean water and proper sanitation are an investment without equal. (In all, it is estimated that for every US$1 invested in water and sanitation yields a return of US$5.)

To replace the Millennium Development Goals, in 2015, the United Nations re-set the goals for both water and sanitation. In a 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development comprising 17 goals and 169 targets were included:-

a) to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all.
b) to achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations.

Great aspirations but they are totally unrealistic. And you wonder what planet those who drew them up were living on!

However, all developing countries need to get serious about this and should at least try to improve water supplies and sanitation and rich countries should aim to help those that are serious.