Books & Books Chapters

× Despite a remarkable transition to peace and development over the past 10 years, Rwanda is still marked by the consequences of the 1994 genocide. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaged 7.3 percent per year between 1995 and 2006, and public investment has picked up and reached 9.4 percent of GDP in 2007. With security and political stability restored and the business environment improved, private investment has risen from 6 percent in 2001 to an estimated 9 percent of GDP in recent years (Rwanda, MINECOFIN 2008). Progress has also been made in improving education and health indicators. For examples, the number of primary school students rebounded to pre-genocide long-term levels only five years after the conflict. Today Rwanda’s gross primary school enrollment ratio is higher than in most other Sub-Saharan countries with similar income levels, and the number of students in secondary school has almost tripled since 1996 (Lopez and Wodon 2005). Moreover, in terms of health indicators, World Bank (2008a) estimates that, while infant mortality increased from 85 to 137 per thousand between 1988–92 and 1992–94, it has since receded to 97.5 per thousand in 2006.

× The AIDS epidemic is a global crisis with impacts that will be felt for decades to come. More than 28 million people have died since the first case was reported in 1981. In 2005, AIDS killed 2.8 million people, and an estimated 4.1 million became infected, bringing to 38.6 million the number of people living with the virus around the world; 24.5 million of these people live in Sub-Saharan Africa (where in some countries one in three adults are infected) and 8.3 million live in Asia (UNAIDS 2006).

× The increasing prevalence of HIV in Rwanda, along with the likelihood of continued effects of the genocide of 1994, suggests that many rural households may be facing extreme stress, and their agricultural production may be changing. Policymakers and development practitioners seek to understand how Rwandan households are affected and how they are reacting to the stress so that development policies can best support improvements in rural livelihoods under this changing environment. If production systems are shifting to less nutritious crop mixtures or ones that increase the potential for soil erosion on the hillsides, measures may be needed to counterbalance the negative effects.

× This chapter is intended to respond to the need to better understand the implications of the AIDS pandemic for the agricultural sectors in the hardest-hit countries of eastern and southern Africa. The six countries of the world with estimated HIV prevalence rates exceeding 20 percent1 are all in southern Africa: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe (UN Census Bureau 2003). Five other countries, all in southern and eastern Africa (Cameroon, Central African Republic, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique), have HIV prevalence rates between 10 and 20 percent. For shorthand, we hereafter refer to these countries as the “hardest hit” countries.

× HIV/AIDS continues to spread throughout the developing world, in transition countries, and among poor and marginalized populations in industrialized countries. In its third decade, and even with increased resources, global AIDS policy is still failing to stem the epidemic. HIV prevention fails because it ignores the fundamental causes of the epidemic, it is unscientific, and it attempts to intervene at the last minute with programs limited to behavior change.

× Based on qualitative fieldwork in urban and rural Zambia (see Bond et al. 2003), this chapter aims to demonstrate that HIV-related stigma and discrimination are fueled by the practicalities of limited resources and narrow options and, in this wider context of poverty and household fatigue, that the poor, women, orphans, and rural dwellers are particularly vulnerable to HIV-related stigma and discrimination. It is apparent that a significant proportion of discriminatory actions are caused by the fact that HIV and AIDS can be so very hard to manage in the context of poverty. Significant differences between the urban and rural sites that emerged in our material, with overall less stigma manifested in the urban site and more pronounced stigma in the rural site, suggest that it is possible to alleviate household stress and reduce this type of stigma and discrimination by providing services and support.

× The AIDS pandemic is a global crisis with impacts that will be felt for decades to come, demanding massive responses at many levels. Such responses need to continue to be grounded in the three core pillars of prevention, care and treatment, and mitigation. But these responses need to be much larger in scale, far more broadly based, and better connected so as to better match the scale, breadth, and interconnectedness of the pandemic’s causes and impacts.

× The response to HIV/AIDS in Africa has evolved considerably since the first cases were reported on the continent in the early 1980s. After the initial medical and public health responses through the mid-1990s, there was an enormous expansion in the scope of the strategic approaches and level of political and financial commitment to fight the disease. In the absence of a vaccine or cure, the global response expanded far beyond the traditional confines of the health sector. Perceiving strong links between AIDS and the greater development processes, national and international organs reached out to a wide array of stakeholders to implement a broad multisectoral agenda. This expansion in vision was accompanied by a corresponding development of institutional structures and coordination mechanisms. Efforts to extend, harmonize, and improve the management of the multisectoral response are very much continuing today.

× Over the past 15 years, evidence has accumulated of how HIV/AIDS impacts rural people who depend for their food and livelihood on agriculture and the management of natural resources. Evidence is also available, though less extensive, of how changes in the rural environment influence the dynamics of HIV/AIDS. It is striking, however, how little this understanding has yet to contribute to the methods used in the struggle with HIV/AIDS. The “expanded response” that UNAIDS is spearheading to meet the targets set by the UN General Assembly Session on HIV/AIDS in 2001 includes no reference to agricultural or natural resource–based measures for prevention, treatment, and care (Stover et al. 2002). This is hardly surprising because there is as yet little documented evidence of their effectiveness in HIV/AIDS control terms or feasibility on a wide scale. Much less is it clear how such efforts might be financed. Across the sectoral divide, agricultural and natural resource management policies and programs are aimed at enhancing food security, improving nutrition, and expanding livelihood opportunities. However, the decisionmakers responsible for the most part have a very limited understanding of how these may be affecting HIV/AIDS risks, positively or negatively, and how these inadvertent effects can be optimized. Few have a clear understanding of how HIV/ AIDS is affecting or will in the future affect attainment of the objectives they now pursue and what adjustments will be necessary to keep these in sight.

× In October 2005, the Consortium for the Southern Africa Food Security Emergency (C-SAFE) transitioned to its final year of a regional “developmental relief ” program. Yet, members continued to collaborate on this specific learning activity given their common objectives of improving monitoring and evaluation (M&E) for HIV/AIDS-related beneficiary groups. C-SAFE’s strategic objectives included (1) improving and maintaining nutritional status, (2) protecting productive assets, and (3) improving community resilience to food security shocks.

× Rollout of antiretroviral (ARV) therapy under the aegis of the WHO’s “3 by 5” initiative, with funding from numerous donors via the Global Fund for TB, HIV/ AIDS, and malaria, the U.S. PEPFAR and U.K. DFID, gives cause for hope for all those millions of people in Africa who are living with HIV/AIDS. Midway through 2005 nobody seriously believed that the target of 3 million people on treatment by year end would be achieved. However, it was a necessary goal at that stage. But for those concerned with meeting the challenge of HIV/AIDS impacts, increased antiretroviral therapy (ART) availability has to be seen for what it is: an opportunity to take a breath in the struggle against the impact of AIDS and think, and think hard, about what we do next.

× The commercialization of agricultur has, in many diverse circumstances, led both to an increase in household income and to changes in the way household resources are organized to earn that income, Have these changes meant that food intakes are more nutritions and that health and sanitation conditions are improved? This chapter addresses three central questions: (1) to what extent are increments in income spent on nonfood items, in particular, health-related items; (2) to what extent are increments in income spent on food, and (controlling income) dows the switch to commercial production alter the marginal propensities to spend on food; and (3) to what extent do increments in food expenditures lead to greater calorie intakes, both at the household level and at the individual preschooler level?

× The choice between subsistence food crops, on the one hand, and cash crops, especially nonfood cash crops predominantly meant for exports, on the other hand, is a subject of considerable debate among policy makers as well as development specialists. The debate raises issues not only at the level of farming households but also at the level of national and international policies, including macroeconomic policies such as trade and exchange rate policies. This chapter reviews and focuses on those aspects of principal relevance in the context of an overall agrcultural development strategy and food security.

× One of the most contentious issues in the cash crop/food crop debate revolves around the impact of commercialization of agriculture on the health and nutritional status of women and children/ This chaper examines the effects of commercialization of agriculture on preschoolers' health nad nutritional status. The chapter also assesses the effects on women along the lines of the conceptual ramework described in chapter 2.

× The three chapters in Part III report synthesis is findings from the microlevel IFPRI research in The Gambia, Guatemala, Kenya, the Philippines, and Rwanda, as well as from the other case studies presented in Part V. Any attempt to synthesize and generalize on the basis of the detailed case studies runs the risk of excessively extrapolating from special circumstances and of losing insights gained from these case studies, whose strengths are the detailed~assessments of the commercialization-production-income-consumption-nutrition chain and the important feedbacks from these elements. This chapter, on the first elements of the commercialization chain, is therefore to be seen in the context of the following two chapters, and all the three synthesis chapters together are to be seen in the context of the rich insights from the individual studies discussed later.

× In this chapter, the basic theoretical relationships and definitional issues related to the commercialization of agriculture and described. Simply speaking, cash crops can be defined as crops for sale. The listing of typical agricultural processing enterprises in chapter 9 gives a rough overview of cash crops (also, see von Braun and Kennedy 1986). Yet, commercialization of agriculture as a process and a characteristic of agricultural change is more than whether or not a cash crop is present to a certain extent in a production system. Commercialization of subsistence agriculture and take many different forms.

× Why should there be a book about the commercialization of subsistence agriculture, economic development, and nutrition? There are two compelling resasons. First, concerns and suspicions about adverse effects on the poor of commercialization of subsistence agriculture persist and influence policy of developing countries and of donor agencies. Second, in rural areas of low-income countries, nutritional welfare is determined by many complex factors whose relationships to agricultural commercialization and economic development need to be traced in order to design optimal rural growth policies that benefit the poor.

× In countries where farming and fishing are major productive activities, processing enterprises can have a strategic developmental role. Infrastructural, institutional, and contractural issues arise around them. Whereas consumption and nutrition effects of agricultural commercialiazation linked to specific processing enterprises are traced in some of the detailed studies in Part V (for example, export vegetables, chapter 12; spices plantation, chapter 14; dairy, chapter 15; sugarcane factories, chapter 13 and 16), this chapter gives an overview of the broader experiences, potentials and problems of agricultural processing enterprises.

× The distributional benefits of commercialization of agriculture, access to commercialization opportunities, and sharing of commercialization risks are functions of institutional arrangements. Obviously, the indirect food security and nutritional effects are, thereby, partly a function of such institutional arrangements. This chapter explores the relevance to food security of one form of contractual relationship in agriculture: formal contracts between producers and buyers (generally processors or exporters), a production and marketing system known as contract farming. The chapter does not refer to the extensive literature on informal contractual relations, such as sharecropping, or on traditional systems of contract farming, such as the extensive "strange farmer" system in West Africa's groundnut sector. The chapter draws generalizations and conclusion from studies done by the author and by other researchers. The latter include two research networks initiated by the author. One network surveyed the experience with contract farming in several East and Southern African countries (Eastern Africa Economic Review 1989); the second examined the experience in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines (Glover and Lim, forthcoming).

× Potatoes, of all food crops, had the fastest average annual growth rate of production in Rwanda between 1970 and 1985: 6.8 percent. This increase in potato production was mainly brought about by a rapid expansion of the cultivated and harvested acreage, which grew by 6.7 percent per year during the same period, whereas average yields only slightly increased by 0.1 percent per year. In 1983, potato production covered an estimated 3.3 percent of the total harvest food crop acreage, and contributed to 3.1 percent of total calorie production (Delepierre 1985).

× Agricultural commercialization, economic development, and nutrition are linked with one another. Policies influence the strength and direction of these linkages and welfare outcomes. Ignoring the linkages may be to the disadvantage of the nutritional welfare of the poor; opportunities to improve the well-being of the poor may be lost. In this concluding chapter, we attempt to draw some generalized lessons from the receding chapters.