Abstract
At a time when there is growing concern about the well-being of the human population across the world, Food for All in Africa offers a timely, detailed, and reassuring review of the issues surrounding food security. The book focuses on Africa, which, according to the World Health Organization, has the highest rates of hunger in the world. Rather than taking a historical view of food systems and their failures, as exemplified by the recently published Famine in the Remaking (Rice, 2020), Conway et al. focus on the present and what the future has to offer. While the increasing percentage of those suffering from food insecurity and hunger has slowed in the last few years and now stands at around 20 percent, the actual numbers continue to rise as the African population grows. The latest report from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization calculates that 256 million people, a fifth of the population, remains hungry in Africa, and the vast majority of these—239 million—are in Sub-Saharan Africa (UN FAO, 2020). Africa is clearly not on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goal SDG 2, on Zero Hunger, by 2030. Given this sad context, the book under review stands out for its positive and optimistic approach to food-related issues in contemporary Africa. In fact, the introduction to the book is entitled ‘A Book for Optimists’, and several of the chapters on the challenges facing many parts of Africa, including the second chapter on ‘Hunger and Malnutrition’, conclude with a section headed ‘The Opportunities’. This makes the book very different from most other assessments of continuing food insecurity and hunger in Africa.
The first half of the book covers the most important challenges that need to be addressed, including the various types of hunger and malnutrition that exist in Africa, the demographic transition that is underway in this region, the types of farming that exist with the prevalence of smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the various threats to food security. The main threats are identified as follows: biological, with invasive species causing damage to crops, land and soil degradation, lack of water, human conflicts, such as the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, climate change and its impact on agricultural yields, food quality and safety, and socioeconomic hazards, such as food price rises, inflation, and job losses. However, the book focuses on various ways to alleviate these threats. One of these is elaborated in the second half of the book, which considers ensuring food security via sustainable intensification (SI).
SI involves producing more and better food from the same area of land while at the same time reducing its environmental impact by developing ‘agroecosystems’. Conway et al. argue that this is an ambitious but achievable objective, and illustrate this by giving very specific examples form across Africa. One such example is the production of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes in Mozambique. The introduction of new drought-resistant varieties has strengthened food security, because the potatoes can be left in the ground and harvested when other crops are not available. Additionally, the orange-fleshed variety is rich in beta-carotene, thereby strengthening nutritional security.
Countering more pessimistic views on food insecurity and hunger in Africa, Conway et al. focus on positive examples and the opportunities for agricultural development across African countries. For example, Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty examines the ways in which the richer nations have effectively deprived poorer countries of access to food indirectly, through the incentivizing conversion of agricultural land for the production of biofuels, thereby undermining food production (Thurow and Kilman, 2010). Africa now imports more food than ever before to feed its growing urban population, with devastating impacts for African agriculture.
Rather than seeing the rise in agricultural imports and growing urban food demand as negative threats, Conway et al. view them as potential opportunities for African agriculture. They maintain that current agricultural trade deficits can be reversed and this ‘underlines the opportunities available to African agriculture if it remains sufficiently dynamic to seize them’ (p. 245). This dynamism requires strong leadership through such programs as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), increased public sector investment in agriculture, new genetics and biotechnology research to improve agricultural production, and the spread of digital technologies to help farmers. Digital connectivity is seen as having enormous implications for agriculture and nutrition. Short message service (SMS) messages, for example, can be sent out to smallholding farmers regarding weather predictions, crop selection, pest control, and management and finance, with further messages on health and nutrition being sent to previously isolated rural households. Similarly, e-wallet platforms can be set up, as initiated in Nigeria, to provide farmers in remote locations with subsidies from government that can be used to buy farming inputs (p. 230). Once again, the key message of this book is one of optimism.
The book was published before the outbreak of COVID-19, and this raises the question of whether its positive and confident tone would have been reduced in the light of the impact of the coronavirus. The pandemic has seriously affected African food security in a number of ways. Lockdown measures have disrupted internal supply chains, thereby reducing food production, and the increasing dependence on externally sourced food has been hit by reductions in food exports from other countries. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has hampered efforts to contain the current locust outbreak in East Africa, which, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), could put nearly 5 million people at risk of starvation in Africa (WEF, 2020). The one positive note is that the African Development Bank has responded to the pandemic by putting together a comprehensive package, Feed Africa Response to COVID-19 (FAREC), to extend financial assistance to African countries and address challenges of food production and supply ensuing from the pandemic. This approach may well be given attention if a revised version of the book is published at some point in the future.
The book could give more attention to how global socioeconomic and political dynamics affect agriculture and food security in Africa. For example, while there are many critical accounts of Western interventions in African agriculture, the growing involvement of emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil and their negative and positive impacts need more attention. On the whole, the book offers a wide-ranging, coherent, and insightful analysis of food security in Africa. Written by several experts in the area of sustainable agriculture, it is a very engaging and readable book that should be of particular interest to anyone with an interest in development studies, and its optimistic tone is very uplifting for the reader.