Driving Development in Africa: Water and Food

 I concluded my previous post by emphasising the importance of tackling power and control abuses by governments and institutions over communities. This is the first of two posts looking into specific instances of this. Water grabs are the extensive acquisition of land by companies or governments where water is implicitly or explicitly given away with the land. Foreign investors have acquired huge quantities of fertile agricultural land in African countries like Zambia ( Chu, 2012 ). There is conflict over the viability of large-scale investment in Zambia where the aggregate of land deals is equivalent to 12.92% of total arable land, increasing pressures on farmland ( Keane, 2011 ). The common narrative behind these deals is governments from 'finance-rich, resource-poor' nations are turning to 'finance-poor, resource-rich' countries to secure their own future food and energy requirements ( Borras & Franco, 2010: 508 ). However, these land grabs become water grabs as ...

Much of the Western literature is highly pessimistic of Africa's ability to ensure reliable food supply with climate change. Following lectures from weeks 4 and 5, I summarise competing arguments and aim to take a more constructive approach. Key to this post is understanding the projected impact of climate change on Africa's hydrological systems. As established in the previous post, hydrological disruption has significant (but not total) consequences for food supply. The principal impact of climate change in tropical areas is increased rainfall variability with more severe precipitation events and fewer moderate ones ( Fischer & Knutti, 2019 ). The effects of this, which I now summarise, are widespread. Episodic precipitation induces more variable soil moisture impairing crop yields. The graphs below compare a year of steady rainfall (1975) with one of episodic rainfall (1981) in Andhra Pradesh, India. Despite total rainfall being unchanged, crop yields were 34% lower in 19...