AGRICULTURAL NEWS - The SADC Regional Vulnerability Assessment estimates that an alarming 16% of the region's population are food insecure.
The effects of the current El Niño phenomenon have further deepened food insecurity in Malawi and the region more broadly. Indeed, the volatility of climate change presents arguably the greatest threat to food security and, by extension, human security in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Hunger and poverty are directly and closely correlated and any threat to food security has a direct knock-on effect on the region achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. SADC has acknowledged the looming crisis in its 'Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security'.
One constructive international response to the threat is the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security in Africa. The objective of the Alliance is to encourage re-investment in agriculture in order to allow low-income food deficit countries to improve agricultural productivity and thus reduce their dependency on food imports and food aid.
Confronted by the ravages of climate change and global food crop price fluctuations, what is the correct balance between food crop and cash crop production in sub-Saharan Africa? Some contend that cash crop production discourages food crop production and intensifies human insecurity, yet the tobacco sector may point to a new and better way.
While recognising the high cash value of tobacco, which is seven times more profitable than maize and fourteen times more profitable than cotton per hectare, tobacco production in Sub-Saharan Africa is increasingly conducted as part of a balanced, holistic and integrated agricultural production system.
Tobacco takes the GAP
Food security is dependent on a raft of factors, not least of which is Good Agricultural Practices (GAP). Good Agricultural Practices are a series of codes, standards, and regulations that seek to achieve four key objectives: ensure safety and quality in the agricultural produce chain, capture new markets by modifying supply chain governance, improve natural resource use, worker’s health and working conditions, and to create new markets and opportunities particularly for farmers in developing countries.
Defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation as those objectives that “address environmental, economic and social sustainability for on-farm processes and result in safe and quality food and non-food agricultural products”, tobacco companies subscribe fully to GAP objectives and go far beyond the minimum required for mere compliance.
