Peter Gubbels looks at the potential of food reserves. In the Sahel, increased food reserves and buffer stocks at the regional, national and local levels can be a valuable tool for improving access to food and for stabilising food prices. Purchasing locally produced foodstuffs when prices are low, and selling when prices are high, can keep prices in check, protect farmers’ incomes and mitigate the effect of steep price rises.
Images of famine in Somalia have recently drawn the world’s attention to the wider issue of food security in Africa. Unfortunately, the concept of “crisis” is still strongly associated with short, sharp, disasters such as drought and conflict. The unpalatable reality is that a largely silent, ongoing, structural food crisis exists in many parts of Africa.
In the Sahel, the poorest rural households now purchase roughly 60% of their food from the market. For example, household economy studies in Maradi, Niger, show that the poorest 30% of households produce only about 17% of their basic food needs. They must sell some of this food to repay debts and meet other obligations.
So even if improved agro-ecological farming methods enabled them to double, or triple their food production for their own consumption, they would still have to purchase at least 40% of their food from the market, from labour earnings. This leaves poor rural households highly exposed to volatile food prices. Even in good years, they need to purchase grain when prices rise in the lean season, but increasingly they cannot afford to buy enough. What we’ve seen in Niger is a startling correlation between increased millet prices and the number of hospital admissions of children with acute malnutrition. High food prices clearly reduce poor people’s access to food, contributing to malnutrition.
In the Sahel, increased food reserves and buffer stocks at the regional, national and local levels can be a valuable tool for improving access to food and for stabilising food prices. Purchasing locally produced foodstuffs when prices are low, and selling when prices are high, can keep prices in check, protect farmers’ incomes and mitigate the effect of steep price rises. They can also counter concentrated market power over grain sales and distribution, if complemented by improvements in the market information system, and by decentralised national support for village cereal banks. But because this type of price stabilisation storage involves price regulation, donors who support liberalisation find it politically less acceptable than other forms of support.
Several international conferences, however, have started to consider ways to overcome the many political, regulatory and financial challenges. The reason is compelling evidence that as long as no mechanism for market regulation and control of food price volatility is in place, the current national systems in the Sahel for mitigating chronic food and nutrition insecurity will remain undersized and ineffective. The poorest households will sink ever deeper into debt and poverty, and become more vulnerable to the slightest shocks. There has been a shift. The question now is no longer whether to support food reserves as a way of controlling food prices, but how.
Text: Peter Gubbels
Peter Gubbels works for Groundswell International as co-coordinator for West Africa. He has lived for 21 years in West Africa and recently completed a major study for the Sahel Working Group: “Escaping the hunger cycle in the Sahel: Pathways to resilience”.