Bruce Frayne

Supermarket Expansion and the Informal Food Economy in Southern African Cities: Implications for Urban Food Security

The new international food security agenda proposes small farmer production as the solution to growing food insecurity in Africa. A striking omission in this agenda is any consideration of the dimensions and determinants of urban food security. In Southern African towns and cities, lack of access to food is key to the food insecurity of poor urban households. This article reviews the current state of knowledge about the food sources of such households, paying particular attention to the expansion of supermarket supply chains, their impact on informal food suppliers and the relative insignificance of urban agriculture. The article also presents and analyses the significance of findings from a recent eleven-city survey of food insecurity in Southern Africa conducted by the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN).

The Crisis of Food Insecurity in African Cities

Rapid urbanization and increasing urban poverty are shifting the historical locus of food insecurity from the rural areas to the cities of Africa. This article uses data from the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) baseline survey carried out in 11 cities in 9 southern African countries in 2008–2009 to demonstrate the existence of extremely high levels of urban food insecurity. The lack of access to food is primarily the result of household poverty, high unemployment, and limited income-generating opportunities rather than any absolute food shortages. The article also shows the growing importance of supermarkets, and the relative insignificance of urban agriculture in the food sourcing strategies of the urban poor.

The migration and development nexus in Southern Africa Introduction

The role of international and internal migration in facilitating or inhibiting development is currently attracting considerable attention globally. In southern Africa, the migration–development nexus has been researched for a number of years and policy makers in both the development and migration fields are now paying it increasing attention and increasingly recognising the significance of migration for development and poverty reduction. Much of the international debate on this nexus is hampered by the absence of sound, reliable national and local data. This collection of essays by southern African researchers combines the national with the local, the quantitative with the qualitative, and addresses several prominent themes in the global migration–development debate: remittances, the brain drain and migrant rights. It also focuses on key migration–development issues which have received less attention globally, but which are of critical importance to southern Africa: migration and HIV/AIDS, migration and food security and the rural impact of migrant retrenchments. This Introduction to the collection contextualises the essays within current international and local debates. 1Respectively, Director, Southern African Migration Project, Queens University, Ontario, Canada, and Honorary Professor, Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town; and RENEWAL Regional Coordinator/Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), ILRI Campus, Nairobi, Kenya.

The HIV and urban food security nexus in Africa

The relationship between HIV and food security has been characterized by a tendency to view both as primarily rural phenomena. The urban literature, in turn, has been dominated by a biomedical focus on the nutritional implications of HIV infection on people living with HIV (PLHIV). Recently, attention has turned to related issues such as the value of nutrition supplementation, the nutritional implications of anti-retroviral therapy and the impact on both of rising food prices. This paper argues that the focus on rural food insecurity, the individual PLHIV and the nutritional aspects of food security, while valuable and necessary, are limiting our ability to understand the social and economic relationships that are central to the HIV-food security nexus in urban contexts. Rapid urbanization makes food security in the urban context a complex issue with a number of different and overlapping dimensions. Understanding the reciprocal relationship between HIV and urban food security requires a new social framework which incorporates, but is not constrained by, a focus on the nutritional impacts of the epidemic.

Urbanization, nutrition and development in Southern African cities

This paper draws on exisiting studies and survey data collected from 11 cities in nine Southern African countries by the African Food Security Urban Network in order to explore the relationship between urban poverty and food and nutrition insecurity in Southern Africa. The paper demonstrates that poverty underpins the high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition evident amongst the urban poor in Southern Africa; therefore, access to food, and not availability, is at the heart of the urbanisation-nutrition-development nexus. The paper reviews the state of knowledge about food insecurity and the double burden of nutritional diseases in the urban areas of Southern Africa and lays out an agenda for future research to fill significant knowledge gaps.

The Mythology of Urban Agriculture

The literature on Urban Agriculture (UA) as a food security and poverty alleviation strategy is bifurcating into two distinct positions. The first is that UA is a viable and effective pro-poor development strategy; the second is that UA has demonstrated limited positive outcomes on either food security or poverty. These two positions are tested against data generated by the African Urban Food Security Network’s (AFSUN) baseline food security survey undertaken in 11 Southern African cities. At the aggregate level the analysis shows that (1) urban context is an important predictor of rates of household engagement in UA—the economic, political and historical circumstances and conditions of a city are key factors that either promote or hinder UA activity and scale; (2) UA is not an effective household food security strategy for poor urban households—the analysis found few significant relationships between UA participation and food security; and (3) household levels of earnings and land holdings may mediate UA impacts on food security—wealthier households derive greater net food security benefits from UA than do poor households. These findings call into question the potential benefits of UA as a broad urban development strategy and lend support to the position that UA has limited poverty alleviation benefits under current modes of practice and regulation.

Household vulnerability to food price increases: the 2008 crisis in urban Southern Africa

Volatile food prices represent a common hazard to the food security of poor urban households. In trying to understand the impact of this hazard, income poverty is widely accepted as the principal predictive variable. But could other variables be important in understanding household vulnerability to food price shocks? This analysis uses survey data collected from 11 cities in Southern Africa by the African Food Security Urban Network during the 2008 food price crisis. As expected, the data show that household income is a significant predictor of the negative impact of rising food prices on household food security. However, other variables are significant predictors of household vulnerability to food insecurity as a result of food price increases. The analysis demonstrated how these diverse variables facilitated our classification of different households according to food price shocks using a CHAID decision tree. Demonstrating that household income is not the only significant predictor of household vulnerability to food price volatility, these findings broaden our understanding of the complex factors that can predispose households to food insecurity in the context of rising food prices.

Urban shocks: the relationship between food prices and food security in Lesotho

ABSTRACT The 2008 Food Price Crisis is estimated to have affected millions, forcing households into deeper poverty and food insecurity. However, nationally aggregated surveys demonstrate a remarkable degree of heterogeneity in the food insecurity impacts of high food prices. This investigation uses household survey data collected from the city of Maseru, Lesotho, during the 2008 Food Price Crisis to determine whether the impact of food prices was associated with household food insecurity. The investigation found that, while going without food due to food prices was associated with reduced dietary diversity, there was a much stronger association between food price impacts and reduced food access.