By HLUPEKILE NKUNIKA –
WITH a population of 292 million, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is faced with a critical challenge in addressing stunted growth which has been persistent especially in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia.
According to the SADC regional vulnerability assessment analysis, about 30 per cent of the region’s population is malnourished.
Malnutrition is a critical risk factor in most countries due to poor nutrition and food security.
Stunted growth and low birth weight, developmental delays, weight-loss and illness as a result of inadequate intake of protein, calories and other nutrients have been recorded among countries in the region.
Malnutrition has a powerful impact on child mortality because diarrhoea, malaria and acute respiratory infections which are leading causes of death in SADC countries can only be treated and prevented with good nutrition.
Because so much development occurs in the first few years of life, nutrient deficiencies can have major short and long term implications on the growth of an individual.
Due to poor economic status, most people depend on rain fed agriculture yet they only experience a single rainy season to produce food which is expected to take them through a whole year.
Though the majority of people in the region depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, most of them are poor and are not able to produce for both food security and for sale.
The SADC region whose agriculture is characterised by mono-cropping is not able to produce food which provides a balanced meal to address the nutritional needs of the people.
According to the SADC Vulnerability Assessment report of 2015, 13.4 million people were food insecure in the 2014/15 agriculture season, with an estimated 2.8 million in Malawi, which reported the highest record of food insecurity in the region.
Zimbabwe and Zambia recorded 1.4 million and 700,000 respectively, while Botswana recorded 30,000 which was the lowest.
Low and poor distribution of rainfall, late erratic start of the rains, flooding, extended dry spells and extremely high temperatures were reported to have contributed to low productivity in the region.
Poverty is a major challenge in addressing the challenges of undernutrition in the region.
According to a Senior Research Associate at the  Innovation for Poverty Action under Cargil-Zambia, most rural communities are poor and do not have access to farming inputs.
Rachel Levenson said during a forum dubbed ‘Cargil Africa journey’ in Chipata, that not all famers’ access farming inputs under Government’s subsidised support programme, the Farmer Support Programme (FISP).
Ms Levenson observed that small-scale farmers did not grow enough for food security in Eastern Province of Zambia because most of them were unable to plan due to poverty and illiteracy.
“Some of the people in these areas are so poor and do not cultivate their fields during the productive period but work in other people’s fields as piece work which they call ganyu (piece work), they do so to earn money to buy food,” she said.
Ms Levenson who was doing an evaluation on the effects of hunger noted that by the time they go to cultivate in their fields, time would have elapsed and most of them recorded poor yields.
She stated that her organisation was looking at labour allocation on agriculture and said people in the province who were supposed to depend on one yield to feed themselves the whole year often ran out of food by January and as a result went to work in other people’s fields.
“So they leave their fields during the most labour intensive period to work in other people’s fields to earn money for food, as a result, their yields decrease.
And if this is the case there is need to allow people to have enough food during the period when there is no food,” she said.
Opportunity international, an organisation which provides micro-finance to people in poor countries observed that majority of the poor in Africa live in rural communities where the majority of the malnourished people live and yet rural areas are the most productive areas in these countries.
Opportunity International senior agriculture advisor John Magnay stated that most of the farmers were highly unproductive, saying production and productivity was between 20 and 30 per cent of the potentials of the cash crop value chains.
“We also observe that there has been a very strong focus on training farmers in agriculture practices and giving them the theoretical talks to be able to increase their production and their productivity but that has not manifested because they do not have access to inputs and services they require to turn the potential into a level of productivity,’ he said.
He also observed that poor management of finances was impacting negatively on their monthly requirements especially in Southern Africa where they depended on one season and a long period without rain nor productivity.
“It becomes difficult for them to survive the hungry season which is the period when they are running out of food because food security is a combination of not only the availability of food but also the ability to pay for the food and buy food as and when you need it,” he said.
He also observed that farmers’ pre-sale their crops prior to their harvest and later borrows on high interest rates, saying these were key drivers where opportunity International could improve cash within the household which may have an impact on nutrition.
Mr Magnay observed that there is an emphasis on single crop value chain development and not on nutritional value chain development but in some of the countries where Opportunity International operates such as Malawi, the organisation also supports multi crop financing programmes saying some are designed for house hold nutrition while some are designed for cash crop.
Zambia’s records of under nutrition have persistently been high due to sub optimal infant and young child feeding practices, food insecurity, mono cropping and abject poverty.
Eastern Province nutrition support coordinator Xavier Tembo said environmental and economic instability in recent years exacerbated the existing structural weakness resulting in high cases of acute malnutrition among children.
Mr Tembo observed that poor nutrition in the first 1,000 days in a child’s life was the leading cause of stunting which he said is irreversible,
He stated that it is associated with impaired cognitive ability and reduced school and work performance in later life.
“This has resulted in stunting which was at 45 per cent with 21 per cent being severely stunted and other nutritional burdens include underweight, wasting and micro nutrient deficiencies,” he said.
Mr Tembo, however, stated that Government through the Nutriton and Food Commission was making efforts to reduce stunting and that statistics has shown a reduction to 41 per cent.
He observed that there has been an increase in resource allocation towards specific and nutritional sensitive programmes especially in the work of the global Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) campaign to which Zambia signed as an early riser in 2013.
“The scaling up nutrition concept aims to accelerate national action to reduce stunting through the first 1000 years, it supports countries like Zambia to align national outcomes to key national development policies so that they can result in impact programmes such as agriculture and food security, social protection and safety nets and school feeding programmes among others,” he said.
Mr Tembo observed that such efforts have seen high political will in responding to nutrition problems resulting in the Government’s pledge to reduce chronic malnutrition by half in 10 years time.
He said that the Zambian Government had made interventions of supplementing iron and folic acid in certain delivery points, promoting of breastfeeding with a concentration on early initiation where a baby should begin to be breastfed within an hour after delivery.
“We also promote exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months, continued breastfeeding with complementary feeding thereafter, promotion of diverse diets to breastfeeding mothers, pregnant women and zinc provision during diarrhoea,” he said.
He noted that the promotion of safe water , hygiene and sanitation, growth monitoring and promotion and supplementation of vitamin A were among the efforts that the Government was making in order to reduce stunting in the country.
It is important to note that the SADC Food and Nutrition Security strategy 2015 – 2025 aims to significantly reduce food and nutrition insecurity in the region by promoting availability of food through improved production, productivity and competitiveness.
Improving access to adequate and appropriate food in terms of quality and quantity are other nutritional strategies being applied to reduce food and nutrition insecurity.
The other strategies include improving the utilisation of nutritious, healthy, diverse and safe food for consumption under adequate biological and social environment with proper health care.
With these aspirations, countries in the region should enhance coordinated efforts as they face similar nutritional challenges.
Countries have similar nutritional challenges and coordinated efforts in addressing these challenges should be enhanced to ensure that they have a productive poupulation in future.
Education on diversification in the agricultural sector should also be enhanced especially among countries with the highest levels on malnutrition and this should be coupled with the provision of finance to ensure that people do not leave their fields in the labour intensive period of the year to ensure that productivity is improved.