Water and food and people behind the statistics

Tropical Africa’s complexities of water and food are not self-confined, nor are they purely a side effect of climate change but also of geopolitical circumstances and actions. Countries which rely on wheat and sunflower imports from Russia and Ukraine are experiencing unfeasable rise in prices. Having made the link between water and food clear throughout the blog, for this concluding entry I would like to provide a more personal, direct perspective on life from some of the 140 million people in Africa facing food insecurity, through interviews from a recent World Bank article.

Greenhouse cultivation on Panuka Farms; Source: World Bank.

Maybe it's money, not water

The Baxnaano programme is a first state-led social protection system in Somalia for households facing ‘chronic poverty and the aggravating impacts of multiple climate-related shocks’. Ms. Nishey Mohamed Kheyre, a mother of eight, suffered a locust infestation in 2020 and several years of poor harvest on her land. The programme provided her with funds, which in the immediate term allowed her to pay for food and children’s school fees and in the longer term to buy hens to sell their eggs for income.

In Congo, the STEP-KIN programme was set up to provide financial assistance to urban households, which are usually omitted in similar initiatives. Mrs Catherine Eswabo, a doughnut maker, is at risk of losing her business due to skyrocketing prices of wheat and frying oil on top of all-round rising food prices. She was a beneficiary of STEP-KIN in 2020, when the cash was her ‘only means’ to afford pantry staples. Her husband, a motorcycle driver, now earns the main family income which is highly affected by re-occurring fuel crisis.

In Zambia small-holder agricultural business can benefit from funds from the Agribusiness and Trade Project. Mr Bruno Mweemba, the managing director of a small horticulture business Panuka Farms, used the funds to modernise the cold storage and shift to greenhouse rather than open field cultivation. This is one way to ‘climate-proof’ food production and maintain yields, which in turn prevents import food unaffordability from excluding Zambians from accessing fresh produce, in this case, the English cucumber.

I encourage you to read the full article, and invite to watch the short video from Zambia below.

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Introduction to the blog

Food production is intrinsically linked to water – when agricultural water supply or access dwindle, or dip suddenly, food security follows the trend soon after ( World Bank, 2020 ). Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, focusing on expanding global food security, has brought about intensive initiatives, which demonstrate the critical need for irrigation for food production globally. Agriculture across Africa is dominated by smallholder farmers, which make up some 60% of Sub-Saharan population and even more in other regions. Implementing SDG2 will require as much as 65 billion dollars in irrigation alone ( Goedde et al., 2019 ). Colocynth fruit growing in the Sahara; Source : Britannica. African realities will draw on case studies from across the nations of the continent and report the figurative good, the bad and the ugly of water, as it pertains to food production. Africa is well suited for exploration of this topic, spanning a wide range of climatic conditions, fro

Integrated water management for food security

' Water is both an indispensable input and a key constraint ' . As illustrated in previous entries, the current water condition in Africa, as it pertains to food production, needs more efficacy in water management, and increasingly so, due to climate change effects on hydrology. Expansion of irrigation, particularly groundwater, could be an effective adaptive strategy for the growing population. However, inherent hydrological inequalities pose great challenges and droughts threaten rain-fed livelihoods where potential for irrigation is limited. There exist methods of enhancing rain- fed productivity but they employ temporally and water quality sensitive approaches which are difficult to maintain. (top) Farming in Western Sahara; Source : Getty Images; (bottom) half-moon dam/swales in a field, used to save water during rainfall, Burkina Faso; Source : FAO. What’s the matter (and why does it matter)? Drylands of tropical Africa contain 50% of the region’s population,

Freshwater for food production in tropical Africa

Globally, around 70% (and up to 95% in some developing countries) of freshwater withdrawals are used for the purpose of agriculture ( FAO, 2017 ) – the chief driver of water stress. Studies show that 57% of global freshwater use for crop production is unsustainable ( Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2020 ). This highlights the significance of employing appropriate methods of irrigation to sustain efficacy of food production during periods of hydrological variability. Countries of tropical (broadly sub-Saharan) Africa, reportedly, irrigate only around 5% of cropland, predominantly on a small scale basis. This is due to dependence on rain-fed agriculture ( Xie et al., 2021 ). Rainfall is plentiful in tropical Africa, particularly in the ITCZ, but climate change makes the rainfall patterns erratic and leaves those regions vulnerable to drought. (top and bottom image) Entoto Hill, Ethiopia. Source : Trip.com There exist risk-averse strategies for rain-fed agriculture which focus on pra

Water and Food: African realities

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