Food Security

This will be kind of a long post so I apologize in advance...

One of the main components of the project framework for the agriculture sector here in Peace Corps Madagascar is food security. Food security refers to the ability of a person or people to be able to both have access to and be able to acquire food that fulfills their nutritional needs and that they like to eat. Food insecurity is a huge problem in the developing world and here in Madagascar. Because it involves so many different facets it is both an incredibly interesting piece of the project framework and an unbelievably difficult problem to tackle.

There are two types of food insecurity; temporary and chronic. Temporary food insecurity often comes from an event such as a natural disaster or riots that causes people to be unable to get the foods they need. It can also be a seasonal problem in areas that have especially bad dry or rainy/storm seasons. An example of former is the problems faced by people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The latter is one of the issues that the people of Madagascar face. Temporary food insecurity from a catastrophic event can be tough to plan for because of the unpredictable nature of it. A lot of the preparation for it needs to happen at the governmental or national level and requires planning for worst case scenarios. It also involves understanding the types of catastrophic events that are common to an area and planning accordingly for things that may happen. Sometimes this is done better than other times. Seasonal food insecurity is a little easier to tackle on a local level but still incredibly challenging. Especially with the problems caused by climate change this type of food insecurity will only be increasing and intensifying as the years pass. Chronic food insecurity refers to the inability of a person or people to acquire food on a consistent basis regardless of environmental or other circumstances. This too is a big problem here in Madagascar and is often linked to the seasonal issue.

My belief (and as the disclaimer at the top says all of these are my beliefs and opinions and no one else's) is that food security should be one of the main focuses of all developmental work. I think that the problems caused by chronic hunger and malnutrition lead to many of the other problems that are experienced by people in developing countries. Imagine how hard it is to concentrate when you are hungry. Then extend that over a lifetime. Plus all of the compounded effects of chronic malnutrition. The need for food is one of the most basic needs of human existence and I think that it must be solved before other more complex problems can be. This puts shelter/housing and clean water right there with food security in the hierarchy of problems to be solved. But this is about the food.

What makes food insecurity so hard to solve is that it is a very complex problem with many facets. There is no simple answer or quick fix. That is also what makes it so interesting and an amazing opportunity as a volunteer. There is something for everybody. Pretty much anything you could be interested in can be tackled in a way that enhances food security. There are four dimensions of food security: Availability, Access, Utilization, and Stability.

It should be noted that most of the examples I will use are from the region I am located in. Madagascar is a huge island and the problems faced by people are affected greatly by their region and environment. So of the issues I will describe may be different or non-existent on other parts of the island. Also, different parts of the island struggle with different levels of food insecurity. I can by no means speak for the situation is other regions as I really have no idea. But food insecurity is a problem almost everywhere here in one way or another. It should also be noted that I have been here for a very short time. The things I have observed and heard about are many but there is still much for me to learn. So I can also not claim to be an expert on these things just an extremely interested party. This is a topic I will certainly revisit multiple times so it will be interesting to see how my view of things changes.

Availability is pretty self explanatory but it is that there is literally enough food, and the right types of food, available to feed the population. Here in Madagascar this problem manifests itself in many ways. One of them is in the availability of rice. Rice is the main staple of Malagasy cuisine. The Malagasy people consume more rice per capita than anyone else on the planet. They eat it three times a day everyday. And they do not grow enough of it for everyone on the island. Most years rice needs to be imported. This is an issue for a variety of reasons but for availability it is an issue because the imported rice might not always get to remote areas and be available there. There can also be low availability at the end of the dry season. Rice is a very water intensive crop (although not as water intensive as sometimes thought) and cannot be grown on a large scale during the dry season. When the dry season is ending and people are beginning to plant rice there has not been a harvest for many months. This leaves the region with a large lack of the main staple in peoples diets. Another problem of availability specific to my site is the availability of a wide range of fruits and vegetables. My site is 7km from the nearest town with a market. The foods available in town are rice, beans, greens, tomatoes, oranges, sometimes bananas, and sometimes onions and garlic. That's it. And most of that is in short supply and expensive. Getting to the market makes things a bit better but it isn't stocked with a lot of options either. There is a volunteer in a village 12km further down the road from mine. The people in her town have the same options available in town as the people in mine and 3 times the distance to travel to the market.

These issues do present interesting projects and challenges for volunteers however. There is a technique for growing rice called Systematic Rice Intensification (SRI). It can, and does if done correctly, increase rice yields but 2 or 3 times. Sometimes up to 10 times. It also involves very little extra work and can be practiced by most rice farmers on the island. For those who cannot practice it there is a technique called SRA (think of it as SRI lite) that improves yields greatly as well. We are trained on these as volunteers and it is a big focus of ours. Unfortunately only about 2% of Malagasy rice farmers use SRI. The reasons for this are many but the main on is that it is very hard to create behavior change in people. The Malagasy culture is also one that is wonderfully steeped in tradition and reveres the past and ancestors. This is awesome most of the time but hinders the ability of volunteers to get people to change what they and their ancestors have been doing for a very long time like rice farming. It is a great challenge to do this as a volunteer but one that is extremely important and interesting. If large scale staple crop farming is an interest of yours you can focus on SRI during your service. Lack of diversity presents great opportunities for gardening projects. One of the main things I hope to accomplish at my site is to get as many people as possible into gardening and more importantly get a few important people in the village very good at it so they can continue the education of people long after I am gone.

Access is a more abstract concept but, in my opinion, even more important than availability and maybe the most important part of food security. Access is primarily a financial thing. It means that, assuming there is ample healthy food available in a community, the people of the community can afford it. It can also refer to the ability of farmers to access capital to expand their operations. In Madagascar this is just as big a problem as availability, if not bigger. Using my community as an example, even when there is a variety of foods available at the market most people can not afford it for various reasons. The majority of the food is imported from around Antananarivo. Because of how far we are from the capital and the terrible condition of the roads heading into this region the shipping costs are high which inflates the cost to the people. However, even if things were a bit cheaper, many people here just do not generate enough income to cover their and their family's food needs. When these things are put together you get a typical meal in my town which consists of a lot of rice (it's mostly cheap and it fills you up) with a small side of fish (also cheap but they are very small) or maybe greens. The majority of the time there is not a protein and veggies but one or the other. This leads to malnutrition and general hunger in many children and adults here. There is also the seasonal problem described in the paragraph about availability. At the end of the dry season the rice that is available is more than twice the normal price because of it's scarcity. So then, even the cheap staple crop is too much for a lot of people.

The good news is there are many ways to defeat this issue. The first way, and my favorite as you can tell, is personal or community gardening. On the surface obviously if you grow the food yourself you don't have to spend money to get it. Seeds are significantly less expensive than the finished product. After the first generation of the garden you can save seeds from the crop to use and cut your expenses almost to zero. You also don't have to go anywhere to get it because it is growing close to you. I think the best potential consequence of gardening is that is can turn into an income generating activity (IGA). If done correctly using bio-intensive gardening techniques can create yields that far surpass the needs of a family. Which means they can sell the excess for a profit. Unless the family is very large, in which case they have significantly lowered their expenses. A wonderful side effect of this is that the locally grown .things they produce can be more diverse than what is already available but theoretically less expensive because there are little to no transportation costs. So a person or people gardening on their own can, in the best scenario, create a ripple effect that helps the entire community. Another potential project is helping with money management. Very many people in the developing world and here in Madagascar have very little knowledge about basic personal finances. By helping people, or groups of people, improve these skills you can help them fix problems in their finances where they might be spending too much on something or have an opportunity to cut an expense that they didn't realize. There are also a great many IGA opportunities that people are unaware of. As an example, there was a volunteer here who has finished their term but she helped an organization she worked with who made peanut oil to realize they could and should sell the by-product which is peanut butter. And it is very good. There are a ton of opportunities for volunteers to solve the problem of access in creative ways.

Utilization refers to people's ability to use, in ways that improve and sustain their health, the food that is available and accessible to them. Basically it refers to nutritional knowledge and education. Although many people in the US aren't exactly in top notch physical condition for a variety of reasons, part of education in the US involves learning about food groups and what constitutes a balanced, healthy diet. The debate about the specifics of a good diet could be a huge writing of it's own so there is no need to get in to it but people at least know what kinds of foods should make up their diets. They may not follow it but they know. Here nutritional education is almost non-existent. There is little knowledge of food grouping or basic nutrition like protein or carbohydrates. And so far as I can tell the little that has happened has come from interaction with Peace Corps Volunteers. As I mentioned earlier a meal here consists of a lot of rice and not much else. Part of this is economic. Rice (most of the year) is cheap. But it is largely a cultural and educational thing. The Malagasy love rice and for good reasons. It gets you and keeps you full like veggies or beans really can't, it's cheap, and it has been the staple of their diets going back as far as memory. Rice is very important here. The problem is that people do not understand that they, and especially their children, need more than just rice to grow and function optimally. That is a problem of utilization.

Combating utilization problems primarily takes the form of nutrition and cooking classes. The nutrition classes can introduce the concept of food groups, what groups should be ate at every meal, and how much of each should be on your plate. The cooking classes, in my opinion, are just as important. Once you've introduced all these concepts it is important to show how to implement them. Just doing a simple class on cooking something new does not seem like much but it breaks down the barriers in people that are opposed to new things by showing them simple ways to do the new things that they can handle and expand upon. Plus, if you want to ensure a good turnout for a training, free food is always a good incentive. Some things are universal across all cultures.

The final part of food security is stability. Stability is essentially the ability of people to weather any storm that might come and be able to sustain their food security for an extended period of time, hopefully forever. Instability can come from a variety of places. It can definitely come from seasonal changes like those discussed earlier. For instance, in my region right now it is the dry season. Other than a few light sprinkles it won't rain here for many months. This obviously can cause many problems with food security. It can also come from a sudden loss of employment or an unforeseen sickness. Political unrest too can be a cause. The difficulty with maintaining stability is that it can be hard to see where it will come from and often the best braces against it come from levels much higher than a Peace Corps volunteer. Although it is constantly a hot button issue, unemployment insurance provided by the government is a great example of a stabilizer that is in place in the US and other countries. This is a poor example for a developing country but it illustrates the point. Often great stability is a nationwide or at least region wide project. There are, however, things that can be done on a personal level.

A key for maintaining stability is saving. The recognition that good times ebb and flow and that some of the extra from the good times should be set aside for the bad is really the first step in personal stability. So a task that is an important part of our project framework here is teaching basic financial concepts. Saving money is not practiced on a wide scale here. Most people save none at all. But it can also be the saving of commodities. Saving rice after harvest instead of selling it for instance. Then you can have rice during the more expensive season instead of having to buy it and, if your harvest was good enough and you saved enough, you can sell your excess savings during the expensive times for a profit. Another way to maintain stability is through those ever present gardens (they really are a wonderful development tool). By controlling a portion of your own food supply you protect yourself from any instability that is out of your control. Mostly, tackling instability is an issue of preparation for things out of your control.

Food security, while made up of four dimensions, is really about creating opportunities and programs that work and most or all of the dimensions at the same time. Starting a garden, which must be getting old to read at this point, is a perfect example. On the basic level it works to improve availability and access. The food that is grown is available and accessible to the person or people growing it. But there are many other things that can be done with a simple personal garden. If done correctly, a garden will produce more food than can be eaten at the time of harvest by the growers. This excess food can be sold for a profit. That improves accessibility by increasing money available for other things. The excess food can also be stored using canning or drying techniques. The stored food is now available for a rainy day and thus improves stability. It can also be sold, especially in the case of jam making or fruit drying, and again improve access. When implementing a gardening program it should be combined with an educational program on how to use all of these new foods. So nutrition and cooking classes are a must to make sure that things are utilized correctly. Trainings on canning, jarring, and drying too should be done if appropriate. Seed saving is another skill that should be taught with gardening to help with maintaining the garden at a minimum cost. And once you have new money and food stuffs coming in financial education is important to make sure things aren't wasted and go to the things they are meant for the improve stability and access. This is just one example of a small project that can grow to encompass all of the dimensions of food security and make a real impact on the lives of those we are here to help. This is also very much a best case scenario but there is no reason many of these things can't be done on some level with the most motivated individuals.

I think that food security is one of the biggest problems in the developing world right now. The lack of a good and stable food source is often, in my opinion, the first step in the cycle of poverty that envelopes people in the developing world. It is a great opportunity for a Peace Corps volunteer because it is something that can and should be done on a grassroots level. People need access to education on a personal level that can not be accomplished on a huge level.