Food Policy 26 (2001) 177–207 www.elsevier.com/locate/foodpol Addressing food security in Africa via multiple livelihood strategies of women farmers Christina H. Gladwin a,*, Anne M. Thomson b, Jennifer S. Peterson c, Andrea S. Anderson d a Food and Resource Economics Department, Box 110240 IFAS, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA b 66 Causewayhead Road, Stirling FK9 5EZ, UK c Africare, Niamey, Niger d Santa Fe Community College, Gainesville, FL, USA Received 17 November 1997; received in revised form 14 September 2000; accepted 5 December 2000 Abstract Because food insecurity is primarily a problem of low household incomes and poverty, and not just inadequate food production, projects and programs for food insecure African farmers which aim at increasing production of subsistence crops may be ineffective. Instead, govern- ment should look for ways to improve returns to farmers’ resources in a broader context, which may include expanded opportunities for non-farm microenterprises and agricultural labor. This has been the conventional wisdom since the writings of Amartya Sen. Still unclear, however, are the implications of his thinking for the roles of African women farmers who are tradition- ally the food-crop producers in Africa and are often food insecure. Immediate expansion of income-earning activities such as cash cropping and non-farm microenterprises may not be possible for women in male headed households in many African societies where cash income is seen as part of the male domain. In addition, women farmers may need a long adjustment period to diversify their income sources fully because most African countries are at the early stages of structural transformation. Different developmental interventions, both in policy and in technology, are therefore needed to address food security and economic transformations in Africa in the short and long term. 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Keywords: Food security; Livelihood strategies; Women; Income diversification * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-352-392-1881 ext. 326; fax: +1-352-392-9898. E-mail address: [email protected]fl.edu (C.H. Gladwin). 0306-9192/01/$ - see front matter 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S 03 06 -9192(00)00045-2 178 C.H. Gladwin et al. / Food Policy 26 (2001) 177–207 Introduction All too frequently the problem of improving food security in Africa has been addressed, both by governments and agricultural research institutes by programs aimed at increasing the production of subsistence crops by food-insecure African farmers1. However, food insecurity is primarily a problem of low household incomes and poverty, and not just inadequate food production. Instead, government should look for ways to improve returns to farmers’ resources in a broader context, which may include expanded opportunities for non-farm microenterprises, cash cropping, and agricultural labor. This has been the conventional wisdom since the writings of Amartya Sen (1981). Sen’s message, however, has still not been heard in sub-Saharan Africa where it is frequently assumed that the focus has to be on increasing aggregate food pro- duction. This goal, long the cornerstone of successful Green Revolutions in Asia and Latin America, has now inspired present-day attempts at technology transfer by programs such as Sasakawa Global 2000 (SG 2000) which operates in eight African countries (Borlaug and Dowswell, 1995). To encourage participation, Nobel prize winner Borlaug, President Jimmy Carter, and Rohei Sasakawa need only point to indicators such as per capita food production growth rates to show that Africa has lost the ability to feed itself. Occasionally, they highlight the differences between China’s recent successes and Africa’s recent failures: in 1992–94, China’s average cereal yields were 4482 kilograms per hectare (kg/ha) and the highest of the developing world; Africa’s were the lowest at 1023 kg/ha. In contrast, sub-Saharan Africa’s population growth rates in 1990–1995 were the highest in the world at 3% per annum, while China’s were a low 1.4% per annum. These indicators clearly show that Africa’s per capita food production has not kept up with its population growth rates. It is a continent of farmers which imports one-third of its food grains; nine of its ten largest countries are net importers of food. Yet most African countries are agriculturally-based, with 75–85% of the labor force still employed in agriculture and most of the GDP still generated by the agricul- tural sector. Tomich et al. (1995) term them CARLs, countries with abundant rural labor. Characteristically, they are at the earliest stages of structural transformation, which means they are years — even decades — away from a turning point when their economies will diversify from one mostly dependent on agriculture to one with 1 The common agro-technical assumption that more food crop production should give more food secur- ity does not always hold. The policy issues are rather more complicated, because increasing aggregate food production impacts on food-insecure households only indirectly and doesn’t answer the question: Whose food production are we talking about? Estimates of a national “food gap” have very limited relevance because food supplies are usually badly distributed in an economy. Food is wasted by the rich and often bypasses the hungry people, so that estimates of an aggregate food gap don’t tell us much about how many and which people are hungry. National production figures are often used by policy planners to calculate a “national food gap” in order to get food aid from donor countries. Unfortunately, the food aid then depresses local production by depressing its price or, if it enters the commercial sector, never gets to the poor who need it. C.H. Gladwin et al. / Food Policy 26 (2001) 177–207 179 developed agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors, and in the process increase agricultural productivity (Tomich et al., 1995: 14). What are some of the causes of Africa’s low agricultural productivity? Among the factors mentioned besides high population growth rates are 25 years of mostly poor weather; too few roads, vehicles, and telephones; predatory governments and officials; public policies which lurch from extreme to extreme; and devastating regional and ethnic conflicts. In addition, there is a factor called “the invisible factor” by the women-in-development (WID) literature specializing in Africa. Women are the food producers in sub-Saharan Africa (Boserup, 1970) in contrast to the smallhol- ders of Latin America and Asia, most of who were men during their “Green Revol- utions”. The constraints facing women farmers are proving to be greater stumbling blocks than those faced by male smallholders in Latin America and Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. These include women’s lack of access to: land (women beg for land rather than own it), capital or credit or cash (women don’t usually raise cash crops which are in the male domain), fertilizer or manure, technological training and extension services, the political arena, and the non-farm labor markets (women lack education) (Gladwin, 1991; Gladwin and McMillan, 1989). Gender is called “an invisible factor” because gender-related constraints that lower women’s productivity are almost never mentioned as explanations of Africa’s food security problems (Eicher 1982, 1995; Smale, 1995), in spite of their being a major reason why the findings of Sen have not been taken on board by African policy makers. They are mentioned in the women in development (WID) literature, but are delinked from the food security literature. This is in spite of Boserup’s (1970) treatise that clearly situated her discussion of women’s roles and Africa’s “female farming systems” within an overall framework of economic development, as well as more recent evidence from nutritional studies that women’s schooling, women’s status relative to men’s, per capita food intake, and per capita incomes are important deter- minants of child nutrition in Africa (Pinstrup-Andersen et al., 1999; SCN/IFPRI, 1999). In the pre-Sen era, when development thinking could be summarized as “more food crop production should give more food security”, WID Africanists proposed straightforward solutions to food insecurity. Just as smallholder food producers in Asia and Latin America were targeted in the 1960s and 1970s with yield-increasing inputs of production (hybrid seeds, credit, fertilizer, manure) in order that Green Revolution yields might be produced, so African food producers — who just happen to be women — should be targeted in the 1980s and 1990s with the same. A few programs were developed to target credit, fertilizer, hybrid seeds, agroforestry seed- lings directly at women, usually through women’s clubs (e.g. the VEZA/HODESA program; D’Arcy, 1998). They were either failures in implementation because the men in male headed households (MHHs) decided if and to what extent the women would repay the credit, or they died when unsustainable credit programs failed (Adams and Von Pischke, 1995), or they were given the axe along with other good projects during the era of structural adjustment programs. The current thinking about food security, that it is an issue of household income and poverty and not just inadequate aggregate food production, challenges programs 180 C.H. Gladwin et al. / Food Policy 26 (2001) 177–207 which encourage women to just grow more food crops to improve their food security. In this paper, we propose a more complex strategy and suggest that different develop- mental interventions, both in policy and in technology, are needed to address the food insecurity of women farmers. What is needed, as a general rule, are interventions to increase women’s incomes and help make their livelihoods more sustainable. Yet African women farmers may need a long adjustment time period to diversify their income sources fully because most African countries are at the early stages of struc- tural transformation.