Sub-Saharan Africa. Geog 377: Africa south of the Sahara

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Thesis statement
The paper discusses the impacts that arise from food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa and discussing strategies around the world that can improve the situation for the worst affected peoples.
Introduction
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been vulnerable to food insecurity as a result of the existing extreme weather events, increased rates of poverty, lack of successful local agriculture, inability and disinterest to take action by local officials coupled with infrastructures that are inadequate such as roads and telecommunication networks which have lead to the decrease in production and distribution capacities (Dermott, 2010). The situation has been complicated further by the existence of disorganized and inefficient international response to crisis.
Climate change has become an inevitable process especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where it has caused negative impacts not only to rainfall deficits and projected warming, but has also made the Sub-Saharan Africa population vulnerable. The severe impact has been felt upon food security which encompasses three components that is access, availability and utilization (Thompson et.al, 2010).Due to the climate change effects, there has been decreased crop productivity, land degradation coupled with high market prices, negative effects on the people`s livelihood and increased malnutrition.
Africa as a continent, has been commonly identified as a region that is highly vulnerable to the change of climate (Cooper et.al, 2008).This has been characterized by the political, economic and social constrains that develops human capacity systems to cope up with external stressors of climate change and the related hazards.
Impacts of food insecurity in Sub-Sahara Africa
Since the late 1950s, food insecurity crisis has been characterized as a supply issue in the Sub-Sahara Africa. Lack of successful and widespread agriculture, has influenced the failure of the local governments to provide food that is enough for their population. This has resulted to dependency on food aid. In reaction to the food insecurity issue, the Western governments and some aid organizations have sought to supply foreign food aid to Sub-Sahara Africa in the form of imported crops mainly from developed and wealthy countries (Paul, 2008).In the recent years, these tactics have been implemented and have extended to comprise support for improved and new technologies in order to advance agriculture and increase food supply systems in Africa. The new and advanced technologies include the exportation of better farming equipment, the use of herbicides and pesticides and the widespread use of Genetically Modified (GM) seeds to produce crops in large quantities. Presently there has been a global push to provide more comprehensive solutions that will help deal with the modern pressures and help compound the situation as the plight of the African nations can no longer be based on the idea of shortage. Some people have argued that the problem is not food security, but inadequacy in the international and local actors to supply food where it is much needed in a timely and cost effective manner. Therefore, the global community needs to think outside the supply box and come up with a solution that will combine modern methods that are innovative in order to solve the various problems that contributes to food insecurity. The adaptation strategies to be implemented should act as a means of mitigating the situation of severe food insecurity across the entire region of the Sub-Saharan Africa and other nations in the world. The strategies need to focus on development issues whereby adaptation is an important key to counteract the negative impacts and also improve the population potential to undergo development processes.
Strategies used to improve the situation for the worst affected populations in the world
As discussed above, it is evident that the initiative of initially providing sufficient food to Sub-Saharan Africa has become outdated as it has failed to meet the various challenges created by the ever changing environmental and economic factors. The provision of food aid by the United States and other developed countries in the form of subsidized genetically modified crops has been proved unsuccessful in the twenty-first century. This is because of the ever increasing cost of international transportation annually and the shipping of massive quantities of food has become too expensive. In addition to that, when food arrives in Africa from the developed countries, the aid groups operating in the conflict zones often struggle to deliver the food to all the affected people. This is as a result of existing uncooperative governments who have left the work of feeding the hungry to the international non-governmental organizations. (Fondo, 2008).The existing controversy over the GM crops safety, has contributed to some of the African countries rejecting the help of this kind of nature thus creating tension among the food donors and the recipient countries. Moreover, suggestions to develop and implement factory farming have run up against the existing objection from farmers who still wish to rely on the traditional methods of agriculture.
As a result of the conditions above, new and alternative concepts have been proposed to change the way aid is provided to the worst affected people in the world. The initiatives proposed and implemented have fostered a more preventive response to putting an end to the food crisis. Western countries together with the large aid agencies have supported the idea of consolidating the food aid efforts. In the need to deliver aid food in a more effective and efficient way possible, policy makers have started to come up with ideas that will enable them share responsibilities, cut down on transportation costs and spend their finances effectively without wasting. In order to achieve this, there has been a movement toward offering assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of monitory aid with less emphasis on crop importation. Monitory aid has been provided in the form of development loans and microfinance. Stronger support has been directed to the regional and local agriculture through the replacement of the existing large factory farms that concentrate their efforts on the exportation rather than importation of crops. This steps would be beneficial if implemented by the Sub-Saharan Africa government as they will help them further develop , improve their infrastructure and institutions such as schools , hospitals , transport and communication that will increase food supply as well as economic growth for the overall region thus proving employment and effective services to its population.
Of all the alternative proposals, one of the most progressive is to find answers for climate change as it is the root cause of food insecurity. Resulting changes in rainfall patterns, annual temperatures, weather patterns and soil quality, have tremendously affected the Sub-Saharan Africa region and has triggered the recent food challenges. Therefore scientists have introduced climate prediction models that would help farmers and policy makers determine the weather patterns in advance (Gregory et.al,2005).With this available technologies , level of preparedness against drought and other potential disaster conditions will be enhanced thus improving rural farming and prevention of massive loss of crops.
According to Gonzalez (2010), since the formation of the United Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), its main objective was to combat hunger throughout the world by the use of various strategies such as improving agriculture, fishing and livestock rearing. The original purpose of the organization was to handle the problem of hunger through the initiation of various actions that would be coordinated worldwide and not restricted to measures that are taken by the governments of the nations suffering from food insecurity. The organization has been able to bring various parties together on a world wide scale and has had the opportunity to define the world agriculture and food policies (Philips & Ilcan, 2003). The World Food Summit together with Food and Agriculture Organization, have placed emphasis on the monitoring progress towards hunger target through establishment of food insecurity and vulnerability information and mapping systems in order to monitor national and global efforts to reach the World Food Summit (WFS) goals. The WFS has also put in place plan of actions to move towards eliminating hunger and persistent food insecurity crisis. The strategies that have been proposed by the above two organizations are based on livelihood approaches (Farrington, 2001).The elements identified to be relevant to this particular approach were such as:
* Focusing on the diverse strategies such as farming, livestock rearing, non-farm employment and migration .Assets such as economic, human , financial, natural resources , social and political were also the centre of their focus
* Analyzing of existing constraints that are faced by people in pursuing the above strategies or in the access of the named assets
* Establishing the impacts of politics, policies , formal and informal institutions on the population
* Analyzing the impact of factors outside the control of the vulnerable groups such as War, HIV/AIDS, floods among others and constrain that is related to seasons.
* Through focusing on the outcomes that people aim to accomplish through the pursuit of the livelihood strategies such as security, increased income and well being.
Rights based approaches on the other hand, have emerged from the inclusive of the humans` rights framework that has been based on what is perceived. For example, people everywhere should have the capability to claim a number of fundamental political, civil, economic and socio-cultural rights irrespective of religion, culture, race or gender. This emphasizes on the right to food and free from hunger to be inseparable from other social and economic rights such as right to a means of living (Hussein, 2002). Socio-economic rights have been receiving less attention compared to political and civil rights though the two sets of rights have been considered to have equal weight in the international law. This has stirred up the growing interests among the campaigners and the international Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) and some donors to anchor efforts of addressing food security in a rights approach. Though with the availability of the Social and economic rights, the human rights approach continues to face problems of implementation by various governments thereby making food insecurity a difficult issue to address. This has resulted to key intergovernmental agencies responsible for agriculture and food to follow up the agenda of the donor (Van de Sand, 2001). For these organizations to succeed, ...