Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum)

Re: Making agriculture work for nutrition: Prioritizing country-level action, research and support

 

Uneven access to labour, within rural communities, leads to actual hunger.

Service providers and decision-makers should not turn a blind eye

The reasons for under-nutrition are several, interconnected and mutually reinforced and so have to be all the attempts of interpretation and remedy. Having said that, I want to draw the attention to the following aspects, related to subsistence farmers’ sustainability and resilience:

  • The “labour access” issue. Uneven access to labour within rural communities is a major determinant of food insecurity and poor nutritional status leading the lowest quintiles in Sub-Saharan Africa to trans-generational poverty.
  • The “labour access” issue is poorly assessed and addressed. Social differentiation dynamics and inequality within rural communities are part of under-nutrition root-causes, yet are poorly assessed and addressed. Development practitioners, activists and policy-makers should not turn a blind eye. By doing so, several policies and field actions can result harmful.
  • The way forward. Today we are equipped with public goods addressing food and nutrition security. Yet, they are not part of the professional culture of development workers so far. Effective communication between sectors and a “common language” are not yet in place. The way forward should be paved on Action-Research-Learning participatory systems. Networking and inclusive decision-making schemes, at all levels, are needed. Open debates as the current one are much helpful.

The “labour access” issue

If the reasons for the human shame of one billion hungry are several, interconnected and mutually reinforced, so have to be all the attempts of interpretation and remedy. Having said that, I want to draw attention to what I am convinced to be one of the major determinants of the structural hunger in rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Labour and growing inequality in labour access, within rural communities, lead the two lowest quintiles to trans-generational poverty and actual hunger.

The subsistence farmers’ sustainability and resilience is a core food and nutrition security issue. In the current context, the sustainability of subsistence agriculture is fragile and subsistence households are vulnerable. By definition, subsistence agriculture produces the strict necessary for the survival of the family. In a schematic way, inputs and outputs are equivalent and structural surpluses are not possible. In such systems, pursuing high increase of outputs leads to overwhelming pressure over the limited production assets; namely labour and natural resources, including land and forest. That impacts negatively on the environment and on the increasing inequality within rural communities. Pressure over environment and accentuation of inequalities further compromise the already fragile sustainability of households and ecosystems.

The persisting issue is that subsistence societies cannot produce structural, significant surpluses to be channelled, for instance, to the markets. What such societies actually do is allocating manpower unequally among its various groups. In short, someone has to go hungry so that subsistence-based communities as a whole can produce “surpluses”.

The “labour access” issue is poorly assessed and addressed

In poor rural communities relying on subsistence agriculture, not all poor are equally poor. Social differentiation is largely relying on complex systems ensuring access to labour. Labour, since ever, is a core food security factor for small farmers in Africa, yet it is poorly addressed by the mainstream development analysis and action that consider African communities as “labour-surplus economies” and put forward the concept of the small farmers greater economic efficiency relying on “greater abundance of family labour”. Moreover, the issue of power-dynamics within communities, involving access to land, labour and food, is not trendy, as the people-centred and rights’ approach mainly focuses on power (un)balance between the small-farmers / communities and the “others” (government, companies, and so far and so on); which of course is correct and relevant, yet not comprehensive enough.  

Inequality does not stop at rural communities’ gates. Development practitioners, activists and policy-makers should not turn a blind eye. Root causes of fragile sustainability of subsistence agriculture have to properly be assessed and addressed. Socio-economic research also has to come back on the agenda and in the field work. There is an issue on research, too. Research tends to be biased and self-confirming. Often, participatory research is poorly set-up and implemented with little respect for its very guiding principles as well as for scientific and methodological standards. We need robust Action-Research-Learning participatory systems. Several issues regarding the production and food systems should be back on the research agenda. We should, for instance, analyse and compare agricultural calendars by crop and working calendars discriminated by sex and age. We should have clear food systems’ profiles by crop, including production and reproduction aspects also in terms of social differentiation.

Examples from the field in drops

The issue is complex, but I will try to give some examples.

Traditional societies have developed complex systems in order to ensure access to labour because, in the subsistence agriculture, labour is the limiting factor and not land. Such aspects have been well understood by and instrumental to the colonial rule. The chiefdoms and other traditional institutions, it is truth, give rights over land, but the real aim is ensuring rights over manpower. For instance, in Northern Mozambique, there are several schemes ensuring rights over labour, among which the rights of the first born who benefits from important labour services, the dominant lineage, the “slaves”, still visible in the field, the displaced people, the crop and land rotation and land lending, just to mention some. Nowadays, a process of land concentration on the hands of few within the rural communities is taking place. In 1993, in Nampula Province, about 40-50% of the total land was held by only 25% of the subsistence producers that farmed between 4 and 5 times more land per household than the smallest 25%. The land accumulation has to be understood not in terms of property rights on land but in terms of farming capacity, i.e. the capacity of a farmer to have access to labour during the peak season. Actually, various studies show that the population does not feel that there is a lack of land. The smallholders rather complain about labour shortage (insufficient strength to cultivate and produce more, illness during peak agricultural periods, etc.).

In rural settings, seems to picture a situation where extreme poverty is very high (around 40%, i.e. the two lowest quintiles of rural population), better off situations are in phase of consolidation (around 20%, the richest quintile) and “grey” areas exist on the edge of the poverty line (the remaining 40%) moving in and out of poverty according to external conditions, such as family illness and deaths, climate hazards, loss of jobs and cash income. For most farmers food security varies with the agricultural calendar. That is, most farmers exhaust their reserves way before the next harvest. Under those circumstances, deprived from structural surpluses, particularly during the “hunger gap – lean season”, the poorest households “sell” their labour literally for a plate of beans to the “better off” that are in a process of consolidation of assets’ concentration. At this stage, selling “under-cost” their labour, the poorest households remain caught in the trap of trans-generational poverty, because the days worked in the plots of others are days lost in their own plot. And this is about a huge lost in the context of a subsistence system.  

 

The way forward – building blocks

  1. Policy-makers should not turn a blind eye. Root causes of fragile sustainability of subsistence agriculture have to properly be assessed and addressed by a food and nutrition security policy that, fostering sustainable development, acts on several lines; for instance:
  1. fosters mitigation (e.g. SSNs, provision of social services, supply of inputs);
  2. defines sound and appropriate agriculture development goals effectively addressing subsistence farmers (e.g. agro-forestry, innovation, environmental friendly and fair practices envisaging labour-friendly agricultural calendars);
  3. refrains from goals that impact negatively on subsistence households (doing no harm);
  4. foresees integration of complementary sources of income (e.g. public works based SSNs, food processing, eco-tourism);
  5. where appropriate, contemplates measures addressing transition from the subsistence system to progressive intensification of the agricultural production process (e.g. micro-finance, small irrigation, extension and training, farmers associations).
  1. Today we are equipped with public goods better addressing the food security issue (e.g. the voluntary guidelines on FNS and those on land, the new FAO strategy encompassing the Right to Food, inter alia).
    1. The policy response to food (in)security encompasses production growth, market capabilities (trade and labour), social protection (social transfers), emergency assistance, governance and rights strengthening.
    2. Governance and Human Rights need strengthening on the field. It is extremely beneficial having the “public goods” that we already have in terms of FNS and we need further progress. But we also have to work out there, in the communities, in a robust bottom-up action.
    3. The public goods on FNS are not yet part of the professional culture of the development workers, starting at HQ level. Corporate culture is not conducive to such an innovative and interdisciplinary task so far. Effective communication between sectors and a “common language” have still to be developed.
  2. Eventually, we have to leave behind the Washington Consensus and move forward to a smart balance between efficiency and equity, including a dramatic increase in ODA devoted to agriculture and rural development; which under the dominance of the neo-liberal paradigm has fallen from 17% in 1980 to 8% at the end of 1090s and to the 3% of ODA in 2006. (OECD report on “Aid to Agriculture”, 2001; European Parliament, 13 January 2009, On the Common Agricultural Policy on Global Food Security).