Windhoek
A national vision is needed of how agriculture and social protection can gradually move people out of poverty and hunger. This national vision and commitment, supported by permanent domestic resource mobilisation, must support coordinated action at the national and subnational levels.
These findings are contained in the latest State of Food and Agriculture Report of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and comes at a time when some 570 000 Namibians had to be thrown a lifeline in terms of food security via government’s food and drought relief programme.
Earlier this year, another FAO report found that 42.3 percent of all Namibians are under-nourished. The report says policy and planning frameworks for rural development, poverty reduction, food security and nutrition need to articulate the role of agriculture and social protection in moving people out of poverty and hunger, together with a broader set of interventions.
The type of agricultural interventions, combined with social assistance, depends on the context and constraints, but must also consider issues such as local implementation capacities and available resources. In all cases, interventions must be designed to address a range of constraints to allow the poorest to transform their livelihood strategies to escape and remain out of poverty, the report recommends.
According to the report, coherent agricultural and social protection policies and programmes imply coordinated efforts across different government agencies. However, government institutions are not typically organised to readily allow for cross-sectoral collaboration. Political, institutional and operational factors often pose barriers to effective joint action across ministries of agriculture and social protection.
Political commitment, an integrated policy framework, institutional coordination arrangements, financing arrangements and capacity for coherence are five critical elements of an enabling environment to strengthen collaboration and coordination across these two spheres. Social protection contributes to higher incomes and food security not only by ensuring increases in consumption, but by enhancing a household’s ability to produce food and augment income.
The report stresses the importance of social protection programmes which reduce poverty and food insecurity. Effective targeting and adequate transfers are important determinants of success, it says.
In Namibia, most of the poor and hungry are rural households, who largely depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and food security. These family farmers and rural labourers are vulnerable to the uncertainties of weather – particularly with accelerating climate change – and without access to affordable insurance. As a consequence, they focus on survival and adopt low-risk, low-return agricultural and other income-generating strategies.
These households also underinvest in the education and health of their children, as well as adopting negative risk-coping strategies in the face of shocks, such as distress sales of productive assets, reducing the quantity and quality of food consumption, begging, taking children out of school and exploiting natural resources in an unsustainable manner. Data show that social protection coverage is lowest in those regions where poverty is highest and that about 24 percent of the extreme poor are covered by social assistance.
When they are in place, the evidence shows that social protection programmes, regardless of type, have been successful in reducing hunger and poverty. In 2013, social protection helped lift up to 150 million people out of extreme poverty. In addition to the direct effect on income and consumption, social protection can help alleviate constraints to production commercial enterprise that are the cause of persistent hunger and poverty, and strengthen household livelihoods.
The report also states that programmes that are gender-sensitive, reduce women’s time constraints, strengthen their control over income and enhance maternal and child welfare. This is especially important because maternal and child malnutrition perpetuate poverty from generation to generation. In many countries, the majority of cash transfer programme beneficiaries are poor and vulnerable women.
Women are targeted because they typically bear the bulk of household chores, food preparation and responsibility for taking care of children, the sick and the elderly. Transfers placed in their hands are more likely to be spent on what are believed to be women’s household priorities – food and nutrition, education and health.
Social protection can also empower women economically by allowing them to acquire productive assets, improve their financial literacy, and increase their decision-making power and control over income.
Social protection enhances nutrition, health and education, with implications for future productivity, employability, incomes and well-being. Social protection programmes that provide regular and predictable transfers promote savings and investment in both farm and non-farm activities, and encourage households to engage in more ambitious activities offering higher returns.
Evidence shows that even relatively small transfers to poor households can help overcome these constraints by helping households manage risks and by relaxing liquidity, credit and savings constraints. Social protection instruments provided at regular and predictable intervals can increase certainty and security for agricultural households, partially substituting for insurance and providing a crucial source of liquidity.
Social protection can also reduce reliance on negative risk-coping strategies in the face of shocks. Social protection programmes that provide cash can facilitate household saving and alleviate credit and liquidity constraints. If payments are regular and predictable, they can also improve access to credit by serving as collateral.
These constraints are key factors leading poor agricultural households to less-than-optimal use of types and quantities of inputs. Relaxing these constraints frees up households to use the assets they have at their disposal more effectively. Social protection also fosters more investment in the education and health of children, and reduces child labour, with positive implications for future productivity and employability.
Taken together with the increase in farm and non-farm production activities, social protection strengthens livelihoods instead of fostering dependency, the report concludes.