Securing the right to food

Southern African food security experts met in Lilongwe, Malawi, on Monday to discuss how to improve national and regional capacity to deal with food emergencies. Malawi's vice-president, Cassim Chilumpha, who opened the week-long workshop, said not having enough food to eat was a violation of human rights. "Lack of market access for farmers, absence of the private sector participation in food security, pose a big challenge facing the region," he said, adding, "The region needs policies that will ensure food security." Wiepke van der Goot, head of the European Union delegation, said the challenge of ensuring food security should encompass measures that "enhance political stability and good governance" and accelerate "not only the entry, but also the competitiveness of smallholder production on the open market". The food security experts are to also look at the role of national and regional strategic grain reserves (SGRs) in helping to underpin food security. SGRs allow for the rapid mobilisation of food stocks to avert a crisis, rather than waiting for food to be imported. The African Union's (AU) executive secretary for the Southern Africa Regional Office, Susan Sikaneta, said she was optimistic that the region would be able to boost agricultural production. "We know for sure that our region is not poor - the region is potentially very rich. The good news is that we have realised that survival lies in agriculture and, with the strong will existing at various levels to increase agriculture production, we have every reason to feel confident that the region will, sooner rather than later, start experiencing good harvests, with surplus for sale." She noted that, at the moment, when some farmers have had good harvests, "they end up frustrated when they cannot find ready markets for their crop, which often rots away". "Food reserves should not only be ready markets for surplus grain, but a good reason to motivate our rural households to grow more food crop. This will also encourage the many unemployed in urban areas to go back to the land and reverse the rural-urban migration," Sikaneta added. The workshop was organised by the AU, in collaboration with Malawi's Ministry of Agriculture and the National Food Reserve Agency.