No. 01: The Invisible Crisis: Urban Food Security in Southern Africa

Over 1 billion people in the world are now undernourished. The current international food security agenda focuses almost exclusively on the food insecurity of rural populations and ways to increase smallholder production. The plight of the urban poor is marginalised in this agenda leading to neglect of the ‘invisible crisis’ of urban food insecurity. This paper argues that the future of Southern Africa is an urban one and that urban food insecurity is therefore a large and growing challenge. The causes, determinants and solutions for food insecurity are not the same in rural and urban settings. This paper suggests that urban food insecurity needs to be urgently inscribed on the food security agenda of local and national governments, regional organisations and international organisations

No. 03: Pathways to Insecurity: Food Supply and Access in Southern African Cities

As in many parts of the world, supermarket expansion and control of food supply chains is having a major impact on the quality, quantity and price of food available to urban residents. Growing numbers of poor households in Southern African cities now obtain their food, directly or indirectly, from supermarkets. In most cities, these same households spend over 40 percent of household income on food. Supermarket expansion is also having a major impact on the informal sector. This paper reviews the changing nature of the urban food supply in Southern African cities, the role of supermarkets and the informal sector in food accessibility and the implications for the food security of the urban poor

Landslide Denied: Exit Polls vs. Vote Count 2006

There was an unprecedented level of concern approaching the 2006 Election ("E2006") about the vulnerability of the vote counting process to manipulation. With questions about the integrity of the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections remaining unresolved, with e-voting having proliferated nationwide, and with incidents occurring with regularity through 2005 and 2006, the alarm spread from computer experts to the media and the public at large. It would be fair to say that America approached E2006 with held breath.For many observers, the results on Election Day permitted a great sigh of relief -- not because control of Congress shifted from Republicans to Democrats, but because it appeared that the public will had been translated more or less accurately into electoral results, not thwarted as some had feared. There was a relieved rush to conclude that the vote counting process had been fair and the concerns of election integrity proponents overblown.Unfortunately the evidence forces us to a very different and disturbing conclusion: there was gross vote count manipulation and it had a great impact on the results of E2006, significantly decreasing the magnitude of what would have been, accurately tabulated, a landslide of epic proportions. Because much of this manipulation appears to have been computer-based, and therefore invisible to the legions of at-the-poll observers, the public was informed of the usual "isolated incidents and glitches" but remains unaware of the far greater story: The electoral machinery and vote counting systems of the United States did not honestly and accurately translate the public will and certainly can not be counted on to do so in the future

The effect of population aging on aggregate labor supply in the United States

Output growth is determined by growth in labor productivity and growth in labor input. Over the past two decades, technological developments have changed how many economists think about growth in labor productivity. However, in the coming decades, the aging of the population will change how economists think about the growth in labor input in the United States. As the oldest baby boomers born in 1946 turned 50, then 55, and then 60, an important economic change has slowly surfaced: these people have become less likely to participate in the labor force. While this shift was obscured by a labor market slump in 2002, the aging of the American population began to put downward pressure on aggregate labor supply, marking the start of what is likely to be a sharp deceleration in labor input that will last another half-century.Labor supply ; Baby boom generation

No. 07: Rapid Urbanization and the Nutrition Transition in Southern Africa

The nutrition transition, including the presence of malnutrition and obesity in poor urban populations (the so-called ‘double burden’ of disease), is occurring in Southern Africa in the context of massive rural-urban migration and rapid urbanization. This seemingly contradictory situation poses one of the major threats to public health in the developing world, and impacts the poor – and therefore the most food insecure – to the greatest extent. This paper reviews the state of knowledge about food insecurity and the nutrition transition in the urban areas of Southern Africa drawing on existing studies and new research conducted by AFSUN. The paper lays out an agenda for future research on nutrition environments and discusses the implications of undernutrition and overnutrition for urban policy making on health and food security in the region

No. 3: Linking Migration, HIV/AIDS and Urban Food Security in Southern and Eastern Africa

This publication seeks to establish a background for understanding the complex and dynamic linkages between urbanization, migration, HIV/AIDS and urban food security in Southern and Eastern Africa (SEA). As urbanization accelerates, direct food transfers from rural areas are increasing as poor urban households seek to reduce their vulnerability to high food prices and a cash-intensive urban existence. At the same time, urban households or individual migrants remit money back to households in rural areas both inside and outside the country of employment. A significant proportion of remittances are used for consumption purposes, including the purchase of food. These processes are underwritten by various forms of rural-urban, cross-border and circulatory migration. Migration has clearly facilitated the rapid spread of HIV in the SEA region over the last two decades. For a number of reasons, migrants and other mobile people are especially vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. The epidemic, in turn, is leading to new forms of migration, including children’s migration and return migration of PLWHAs (People Living with HIV and AIDS) to rural areas. Not only does this lead to a decline in remittances but it places a greater burden on rural households. Rural food production for urban household members may also be negatively affected by the impact of HIV/AIDS on rural producers. In the context of HIV/AIDS, migrants themselves may be unable to pursue other food security avenues, including urban agriculture. As HIV/AIDS creates both short term and long term intergenerational impacts within the framework of its long wave epidemiological pattern, the development context is changing considerably. In order to formulate appropriate policy responses, it is therefore imperative to understand the complex linkages and transfers of people and commodities which characterize the “new social economy of migration” in the SEA. At the same time, it is important to understand the inter-related connections between migration and HIV/AIDS for two basic reasons. First, migrants are a particularly vulnerable group, both to HIV infection and to resultant food insecurity. Second, a disease which eats away at the fabric of the new social economy of migration will severely test the ability of urban and rural areas to provide a secure food supply for their populations, both at the aggregate and household levels. It is against this backdrop that this publication documents the key dimensions of the complex connections between urbanization, migration, HIV/AIDS and food security. There is an existing and growing literature on some of these connections; between migration and HIV/AIDS, for example, and between HIV/AIDS and rural food security. However, the linkages between HIV/AIDS and urban food security are less well-established. In addition, attempts to link both HIV/AIDS and urban food security simultaneously with migration are only now being considered, and this project is the first to examine these dynamics at the regional level. That task is rendered more challenging by the fact that migration itself has been undergoing rapid changes in form over the last decade. The publication is divided into three sections. It is designed to lay the foundation for further discussion and the articulation of a targeted action research agenda which addresses both the knowledge gaps and the policy and programming needs of the region in this field of development. This paper begins by reviewing the literature on urbanization and migration in SEA, showing how rapid urbanization is not eliminating migration but intensifying its scope and scale. The section also provides an overview of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in SEA and seeks to establish the reciprocal connections in the HIV/AIDS and migration nexus. Finally, the section reviews current evidence on the determinants of food security in urban areas. The second chapter focuses on the links between migration and HIV/AIDS, migration and food security, and HIV/AIDS and food security. Research on these sets of linkage is proceeding apace although much more is known about the impact of HIV/AIDS on rural than urban food security. The third chapter draws together these sets of relationships and outlines the key knowledge gaps and emerging research questions for the region. Although the research literature is not yet developed in this regard, various conceptual models have been devised to help understand these relationships. Although some of these models focus on rural food security and some on urban, this paper argues that the distinction is artificial, and that migration is the “missing link” between the urban and the rural. Migration links the rural and the urban social economies and emphasizes the point that urban food security cannot be isolated from rural food security and vice-versa. Finally, the paper proposes some next steps in developing a fully fledged and policy-relevant research agenda

Precautionary Saving and Consumption Fluctuations

This paper uses the consumption Euler equation to derive a decomposition of consumption growth into four sources. These are new information and three sources of predictable consumption growth: intertemporal substitution, changes in the preferences for consumption, and incomplete markets for consumption in- surance. Using data on the expenditures of households, we implement the decom- position for the average growth rate of consumption expenditures on nondurable goods in the U.S. from the beginning of 1982 to the end of 1997. Incomplete markets for trading consumption in future states lead to statistically signiÞcant and countercyclical movements in expected consumption growth: consumption growth is expected to be higher when the unemployment rate is high. The eco- nomic importance of precautionary saving rivals that of the real interest rate, but the relative importance of each source of movement in the volatility of consump- tion is not precisely measured.

No. 05: The HIV and Urban Food Security Nexus

Considerable attention has been devoted to the impact of the HIV and AIDS epidemic on small farmers and the food security of the rural poor. Despite the rapid progression of the epidemic in rural areas, it remains an ever-growing challenge in the continent’s rapidly-growing cities where prevalence rates are still higher than in rural areas. This report examines the reciprocal relationship between HIV and urban food security. Much of the research and most of the policy interventions on the HIV-Urban Food Security Nexus focus on the nutritional status of individual People Living With HIV (PLHIV). Other members of households with PLHIV also experience an increase in food insecurity as household purchasing power declines and nutritional needs increase. Urban food insecurity is a complex phenomenon and nutritional research and interventions on the vicious circle of HIV and nutrition need to be reframed within a broader socio-economic perspective that encompasses all of the various aspects of urban food security