The political economy of urban food security in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan African cities in the late 1990s face a daunting set of problem s including rapid growth, increasing poverty, deteriorating infrastructure, and inadequate rapacity for service provision. Even as a renewed debate is shaping up around issues of urban development, there is little attention g iven to the question of urban food security. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s , urban food problems in Africa commanded political attention, the nature o f urban food insecurity in the 1990s is such that it has tended to lose pol itical importance. This is largely because in the 1970s, the problem was on e of outright food shortages and rapid price changes that affected large po rtions of the urban population simultaneously. The impact of structural adj ustment, continued rapid growth, and an increase in poverty make urban food insecurity in the 1990s primarily a problem of access by the urban poor. U nder circumstances where the urban poor spend a very large portion of their total income on food, urban poverty rapidly translates into food insecurit y. The lack of formal safety nets, and the shifting of responsibility for c oping with food insecurity away from the state towards the individual and h ousehold level has tended to atomize and muffle any political response to t his new urban food insecurity. This paper briefly reviews urban food insecu rity and generates a set of empirical questions for an analysis of food and livelihood security in contemporary urban sub-Saharan Africa, and then exa mines historical and contemporary evidence from Kampala, Uganda, and Accra, Ghana, to suggest some tentative conclusions. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Lt d. All rights reserved.