Water and Food in Africa: Story of Despair and Hope

 

Figure 1: A man walks in front of a sandstorm in Dollow, south-west Somalia (Guardian 2022)

Africa, a broad continent with more than 1.4 billion people (Worldometer 2022)  from extremely diverse countries, ethnics, and regions, with all its despair under neo-colonial order and internal failure of governance and hope toward a bright future, has come to the year of 2022, a year also composed of despair from war, COVID-19, and famine and hope for a better world with newly developing technologies and industries. In East Africa, over 14 million citizens have already come to the edge of starvation in August, and this number has risen to at least 22 million in September based on the report from the UN's world food program, and the scarcity of water plays one of the most essential roles in this crisis (Guardian 2022). Unlike the image of many citizens in the developed world, it is not a simple story of absolute water scarcity. As Figure 2 with all indexes of water scarcity demonstrates, the physical water resources in East Africa do not reach the degree of scarcity (Damkjaer & Taylor 2016).In this situation, even with the decrease of grain export from Ukraine and Russia, if the East African countries would have the ability to arrange these water resources properly for agricultural production, at least the food crisis this time would not be as serious as it is now.

But unfortunately, this scene does not happen to save the people who are fleeing from their homes to find new water sources.  

Here we could see the problem. The transportation from water sources to the agricultural field is not a straightforward channel but requires a complicated system with dams, channels, and professional workers to operate the whole system. However, with the unequal international capitalist system which exploits the economic resources and water resources (e.g., Virtual Water trade accompanied by an unfairly low price, Graham et al. 2020) in Africa, it is almost impossible to construct such a system. Internal problems such as armed conflicts and inter-communal conflicts further worsen the situation. 

The relationship between water and food is a miniature of development in Africa: food insecurity in Africa is caused by several interwoven social reasons instead of natural factors including state capacity and enough infrastructure (Loewenson 2020). Those problems are hard to solve and enhanced by each other. In this situation, food insecurity in Africa needs systematic solutions toward all the processes from production (with a focus on irrigation) to transportation to consumption. Even inside each small question like constructing irrigation systems, we still have to deeply investigate the local situation and give a detailed and systematic solution. The development of this continent also faces similar problems of interwoven obstacles and needs different solutions based on the local situation. All the following blogs would critically analyze problems and solutions with considering the above reality. 

This blog aims to investigate this board topic with a specific focus on water and food in Africa in the next few months, and I am looking forward to this learning process and any criticism. 

Figure 2: (a) Groundwater storage (MacDonald et al. 2021); (b) Total Renewable Water (UNEP 2012); (c) Water Stress Index (Damkjaer & Taylor 2016); (d) Annual Water Balance (UNEP 2012); (E) Total Renewable Water Per Capita (UNEP 2012)