The State of Urban Food Insecurity in Southern Africa

Abstract

In 1996, Simon Maxwell observed that “it has been impossible since the early 1980s to speak credibly of food security as being a problem of food supply, without at least making reference to the importance of access and entitlement.”1 Maxwell was referring to the sea-change in thinking about food security that followed the publication of Amartya Sen’s seminal work, Poverty and Famines, in 1981. Sen argued that sufficient food is often available, even in the midst of devastating rural famine and acute hunger. Rather, food insecurity was more often about inability to access food rather than the absolute amount of food available.2 Sen’s vision of dearth amidst plenty is very relevant to the urban areas of contemporary Africa. Shelves and bins in supermarkets in most cities groan with fresh and processed foodstuffs while on the doorstep poor households are unable to access enough staples to feed themselves more than once a day. Food may be more plentiful and more diverse in the city than the countryside but it is far from being uniformly accessible. As Bryant notes: “The donor [and government] emphasis on increasing production