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Food Insecurity in Rural Zambia and the Self-Regulation of Farming Practices
Debbie Brown and Terry Leahy
Food Insecurity in Rural Zambia and the Self-Regulation of Farming Practices
Abstract
In the dominant (Western) discourse around development, poverty is often explained as a failure to follow the latest scientific advice about farming methods. Solutions offered are suggestions to change diets and farming practices. These solutions often gain little traction in the community. Looking at the context of rural Zambia, we apply Foucault’s concept of “docile bodies” (1977/1995). Even though British colonization ended in 1964, the Zambians have been so regulated that today they continue to be self-regulated, following a pattern of farming practices laid down through colonial instruction. Colonization’s effects upon current Zambian farming practices have been an example of Foucault’s “subjugated knowledges”—prior Zambian farming traditions have been obscured. Moreover, this invented colonial tradition of farming practices comes to stand as a platform of resistance to new ideas being promoted by well meaning authorities in government and NGOs. Through this self-regulation, Zambian farmers enact a “Fatal Utopia”—living “as if” this regulated practice would bring about benefits, if only the other elements of the utopia were being delivered as promised.
Keywords: Zambia, civilizing mission, disciplinary society, Foucault, subsistence agriculture
Introduction
Much writing on food insecurity begins with the understandable assumption that food insecurity is a problem and proceeds to consider strategies of aid or economic reform. One of the foundational premises is to view food insecurity as a problem from “out there,” a problem which has the poor as its unfortunate victims and requires a remedy from outside. This approach positions the researcher as an agent of intervention, giving advice to those who want to fix the problem, an assistant to the philanthropist. The corollary is that the agency of the poor in creating their own problem of food insecurity is obscured. This approach also constructs the rational pursuit of food security, using whatever means lie at hand, as an appropriate goal, ignoring the cultural importance of local practices of diet and food provision. If the poor are not rationally pursuing food security by the approved methods, their behavior reveals a deficit, a lack of cooperation and rationality. What is unseen are the reasons behind the failure to cooperate.
Methodology
This brief discussion of power and agency is based on research conducted in villages around the town of Katete in the eastern plateau of Zambia from August 3 – September 20, 2010 and again from November 30, 2010 - January 15, 2011. A set of eight in-depth interviews were conducted in Tumba Village[1] with single women head-of-household subsistence farmers over the age of 50. The other set of fifteen interviews was more various. Some intervieweess were from Nyandane village. Others were local workers from the Kai NGO development center, which is about five kilometers from Katete. Participant observation came from living at the Kai development center and spending time in the villages shadowing the day’s labor with the subsistence farmers.
Hunger and Malnutrition as Problems
The malnutrition of the rural Zambian population is well known – shortages of calories, protein and vitamin A, along with anemia. More than fifty per cent of Zambian children are stunted in their growth (Barkworth and Harland 2009). In our interviews, hunger was commonly identified as a key problem. A typical statement for the older female villagers was that of Odra who said “My living… I find difficulties in my life, especially in finding food, so I do a lot of piecework.” Piecework is day labor done for wealthier farmers. When asked how many times she ate in a day, she made the comment:
Sometimes once, sometimes twice a day, sometimes none; even now there is no food in my house. I had nsima [a maize porridge] once yesterday.
She went on to say that on two or three days of the week she, her daughter and her grandchildren went without food. On some days, she did not have the strength to work. Joshua, who had a high school education, estimated that in his village of 160 households, the only people not suffering from hunger were those who had converted to Islam to receive donations of fertilizer and maize (40 households). Even though his own family had 14 hectares of fields, they had not been able to produce enough maize, because he was feeding members of his extended family, including orphans. He had harvested in March and April but had run out of stored maize by January.
Villagers often go short of vitamins from vegetables and fruits. European vegetables are high status and local weedy vegetables regarded as backward (Ekesa et al. 2009). Setting up the conditions to grow these new vegetables is almost always the solution to vitamin problems suggested by aid projects (for example see Englund 2008). In the dry season, this requires a supply of water piped to the household or community garden. This is unlikely. The expectation of local people is that ‘real’ vegetables will be purchased. Coral explained that a shortage of cash often made this difficult:
But the problem is, if you have got no money, where can you buy vegetables, tomatoes? But if you have a little of money so that you can buy vegetables, or tomatoes, salad, soap, salt.
A shortage of money to purchase vegetables means a deficiency of vitamin A in the diet (Japan Association 2008: 39: Ekesa et al. 2009).
Home cultivation of these European vegetables also depends on access to cash to buy seeds.
OK, it needs money. Money can be a big problem. Because if they want to grow maybe some vegetables. They will need money to buy some seed. They’ll need money to buy, maybe some chemicals to spray (Patience).
Interviewees also mentioned the leafy vegetables grown within the cropping field (pumpkin and cow pea leaves) or collected as weeds (amaranth, black jack, spider flower). There is no reason for these to be in short supply, yet they are not being eaten in sufficient quantities to supply vitamin A (Ekesa et al. 2009). Without fats, vitamin A does not metabolize. There are few fats or oils in the diets of villagers. Wild fruit is eaten less than in the past – only children forage in the woodland around the village for fruit. Fruit trees are rarely planted.
Interviewees were also very short in supplies of protein (whether animal or vegetable). Only a minority owned goats and only six percent owned cattle. They were not killed to provide daily protein supplies. Even pigs, sometimes raised by villagers, were grown to sell. Dora had three small piglets that were not yet ready for sale. A larger pig had been stolen by a gang of young men, who sold it to buy alcohol. Ubiquitous poultry were “indigenous chickens”. These rarely produced eggs and were barely cared for. So chickens were rarely eaten. Dora did not have any chickens, though she had killed and eaten some in the previous year. Joshua’s household, despite his work at firing bricks, was not much better off. He told us that he had seven chickens in his house and rarely ate any eggs. They ate a chicken once every few months. Peanuts provided a temporary supply of vegetable protein after the harvest but not enough for a year’s supply. Beans were rarely grown.
The explanation of shortages for all these protein sources was insufficiency of cash. Dora relied upon piece work to buy food:
In terms of hunger, it’s a big problem, because if you don’t have money, you cannot have food to eat. You cannot have anything to eat. So like, maybe you just buy a small tin of meat, then you need money to get the mealie meal [maize].
Joshua, who certainly had plenty of land to grow fodder and raise chickens, also explained that his family rarely ate meat:
Terry: So do you buy meat, you have to buy it.
Joshua: Yes, when we have got money we have to buy meat.
Terry: So how many days in the week would you be eating meat, do you think?
Joshua: In a month, maybe once or twice. [Laughs]
Lily (Johsua’s wife): Because of poverty.
One of the interviewees from Tumba village reflected on these issues:
There are a lot of wishes; one is living in a good house, and enough money to buy meat.
A shortage of land might explain food insufficiency (Jayne, Zulu and Nijhoff 2006; Milligan et al 2011) but this was not the view of the interviewees. They estimated average household holdings at up to three hectares. Their main explanation was a shortage of cash. Villagers could not afford the fertilizer that would greatly increase yield. Betty, who worked at the Kai NGO centre, did not have enough food for a large family of children and orphans:
I have the land but the soil is not fertile. Because I don’t manage to buy fertilizer to put in the field. So that I can grow a lot of maize. Like last year, I had two ox carts, that’s all. I harvested in March. And that lasted till September, then I had to buy some.
She went on to say that local maize stored better after cropping but hybrids gave a bigger crop. She planted a mixture, explaining that she could not afford more than one bag of hybrid seeds.
Dora is the head of a household of twelve with four adults. They had three hectares of cropping land. She was receiving some support from a son, who had managed to buy them hybrid seed in the previous year. Nevertheless they could not afford fertilizer. She contrasted her situation now with that in the past.
We were buying ten bags of fertilizer. We are failing now to buy fertilizer. Because our daughter was married to someone who was helping us. At least he was working now, and was helping us. But this time, he’s dead, there’s no-one to help us.
Dora pointed to the household granary (nhkokwe). We went up to it and she indicated the dimensions of the granary they used when their crop was fertilized. It had been three times as big. Last year, they had filled their small granary with one ox cart of maize which had been eaten by October. Following that, they had survived by doing piece work to get cash to buy maize, but they were often hungry.
A number of other issues could also help to explain nutritional problems. The crop to which most effort was devoted was maize. Maize success depends on adequate rainfall which in many years was missing and upon a rich supply of nutrients, which in many cases was impossible without fertilisers. Crops that would have been more suitable for the conditions were not attempted. Farming methods were causing soil erosion and degradation. Soils were exposed to rainfall for long periods, losing topsoil. Ploughing, weeding, grazing and burning were all removing vegetative cover and destroying soil organisms.
Typical Solutions Offered
Typically, when aid workers or other development “experts,” almost always American, Australian, or European, come to Zambia, they point out the following problems and offer the following remedies:
1. There is a cash shortage. Villagers do not get enough income from their crops to buy fertilizer, dooming the next farming cycle. SOLUTIONS OFFERED: micro-loans and assistance to start small businesses or grow appropriate cash crops. Use the cash to buy fertilizer and a nutritious diet (Tschirley et al 2004).
2. There is a nutrition shortage. SOLUTIONS OFFERED: Stop growing maize, and start growing other carbohydrate crops that need far less water and fertilizer. Plant rice in damp spots. Grow fruit trees and raise chickens and rabbits. (Japan Association 2008; Sosola et al 2011; Walker 2009).
3. The soil is poor. SOLUTIONS OFFERED: Use zero tillage, crop rotation and intercrops of legumes (Chomba 2004; Mloza-Banda and Nanthambwe 2010; Sosola et al 2011).
Basically, these are various plans to re-orient agriculture and grow sufficient food. Yet what remains a puzzle is why people persist with unsuccessful farming methods, why they are so reluctant to adopt strategies promoted by NGOs and government agencies (Chomba 2004, p. 15). For example conservation tillage has been only taken up by about one in ten farmers in these villages (Chomba 2004, p. 63; Sosola et al 2011, p. 5). Likewise, legumes intercrops, root vegetables, contour bunds, vetiver grass, fruit trees, aquaculture, poultry and pig raising. All these are good ideas that have been promoted quite vigorously. Model farms in these villages have pioneered all these innovations. Yet by and large, villagers have adhered to “traditional” agricultural practices. To understand why even the best ideas are received with caution, we need to consider the history of agricultural interventions as a disciplinary strategy of colonial states.
The Disciplinary Society
Foucault’s (1977/1995) discussion of punishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be applied to British colonization as well:
Napoleon did not discover this world; but we know that he set out to organize it ... he intended, by means of the rigorous discipline that he imposed, “to embrace the whole of this vast machine without the slightest detail escaping his attention.” (Foucault 1977/1995, p. 141).
This can certainly be said of colonization. The British set out to “British-ize” Africa and went about it as Foucault describes:
By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed [to be] pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit. (Foucault 1977/1995, p. 135)
This was clearly the colonial intention for Africa. In 1847, the Education Committee of the Privy Council set out the objectives for “industrial schools for the coloured races”. The second goal was “to accustom the children of these races to habits of self-control and moral discipline” and the detail intended is conveyed by the third goal: