Food Security for Developing Nations
- going by the numbers: I. Ghana
Overview/Introduction
It is well understood that the near-term ability of individual developing nations to provide staple food crops sufficient to meet domestic needs is challenged by multiple circumstances, primarily:
· continued population growth,
· climate changes (and extreme weather events),
· soil degradation,
· difficulties with the supply of water, insufficient for irrigation, and,
· limitations in the availability of land for new arable agriculture use.
To some degree, each of these factors can be mitigated by increasing the yield(s) of staple cereal crops cultivated on pre-existing farmland. However, the mode of mitigation itself may need to be specific on a district-by-district basis in any one country, consistent with the wide heterogeneities of terrain and the past practices of land ownership and use.
As background to addressing this with increased rigor, a group of international agencies including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) recently reported as follows in a new annual review:
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“Now, new evidence confirms that lower levels of per capita food consumption in some countries, and increased inequality in the ability to access food in the populations of other countries, have contributed to what is projected to be a further increase in the percentage of people in the world having insufficient dietary energy consumption in 2017. The latest FAO estimates show that the share of undernourished people in the world population — the prevalence of undernourishment, or PoU — appears to have been growing for two years in a row and may have reached 10.9 percent in 2017.”
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Statistics presented in the same report show that the PoU reached a minimum, of 10.6 percent globally, in 2015, after a decade of steady reductions.
Equally well, however, it’s possible to find other contemporary and national agency reports (such as from the United States Department of Agriculture here) where the trend observed between 2005 and 2015 is expected to continue (albeit using different measures):
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“Given projections for lower food prices and rising incomes for most countries in this report, food security is expected to improve between 2018 and 2028: the share of the food-insecure population is expected to fall from 21.1 percent to 10.4 percent; the number of food-insecure people is projected to fall from 782 million to 446 million; the food gap — the amount of food required to allow all food-insecure people to reach the caloric target of 2,100 calories per person per day — is projected to decline from 36 million tons to 24 million.”
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Background/Resources
So, a primary question with respect to the multiagency statement — relative to 2017, but published last year — as cited above is: “who saw that coming”? More to a sharper point: “why didn’t the large repository of year-by-year crop data (see FAOSTAT here), which the FAO collects, not provide or reveal an indicator of this”? If we track backwards through earlier reporting from the FAO alone, from its flagship publication, dealing with the situation in 2017, 2016 and 2015, it is noteworthy — to say the least — that the metric “prevalence of undernourishment” is not included in any of these reports. If we drill down, to examine the quarterly reports issued by the FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning System on Food and Agriculture (GIEWS), the number of countries requiring external assistance in food supply was reported at a low of thirty-three (total) in late 2016. But, since then, that number has (indeed) grown, to forty, as of end-2018. Furthermore, thirty-one of the forty currently receiving assistance are African nations. It is the FAO’s regularly stated observation that this overall rise has occurred due the impacts of armed conflict (including Yemen, Syria, Sudan/South Sudan and the Republic of Congo), the influx of refugees into specific countries, plus weather-related decreases in cereal crop production.
Obviously, the level/prevalence of undernourishment is only ever a very coarse indicator when aggregated to be a global marker on a year-by-year basis (as quoted above). But, in fact, all of the FAOSTAT database entries are made at the national level. (However, not all countries participate in full. Plus, there are discontinuities observable in specific datasets where FAO-estimated entries and/or extrapolations have been added.) As just one example, Figure 1 here is a (representative and also current) FAOSTAT output showing the trend in undernourishment experienced in Senegal, from 1999 through 2017.
However, it is difficult to incorporate this into any form of “early warning system” given that the data is averaged through three successive years and that the newest data included therein is almost two years old. Looking next at drilling down further, to uncover what may really underpin shortfalls in food supply, it first appears that the FAOSTAT statistics might be sufficient for that on a standalone basis. But while that is the case for several aspects of crop availability — for example, in land use, yields recorded, etc. — there are other aspects such as the availability of labor, crop value, trade balances, etc. which are covered more comprehensively in records maintained by other international organizations and UN agencies, specifically: The International Labour Organization (ILO), via ILOSTAT, The World Bank (IBRD and IDA) via the World Development Indicators resource, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, via UNCTADSTAT, etc. (The World Development Indicators incorporate some data as recorded and published by other organizations. For example, prevalence of undernourishment datasets are included, country-by-country, directly sourced from the FAO. However, there appears to be only a limited effort made to utilize different indicators in conjunction one with another.)
A Preliminary Case Study — Ghana
What is outlined next here is an attempt to lay a foundation for the analysis of food supply, using data from multiple international organizations plus some commercial initiatives. Ghana was selected for this study because it has not recently been on the FAO list of countries requiring food assistance. Nevertheless, it is not entirely self-sufficient and also has a large food export trading position (with raw cocoa beans and cocoa products). So, the expectation was that it might serve as a good benchmark for other African nations, perhaps in more than one single respect. (Other countries which may provide similar baselines for comparative purposes include Morocco and Kenya).
The emphasis at the outset was (intuitively) to try to gauge how domestic food crop production is matched to population growth. UN statistics reveal that Ghana’s population has grown year-on-year by between 2.25 and 2.65% within the period from 1995 to 2017. At end-2017 the total population was almost 29 million. Figure 2 here shows the trend of two primary input factors — arable land and the agricultural workforce — over this same period of time. It can be seen that agricultural employment, as logged by the ILO, has maintained approximately the same growth as the total population. However, growth in total arable acreage, as recorded by the FAO, has, from 2003 onwards, lagged behind the steady increase in the population.
The shortfall in farmland can be probed in more detail, since the FAO estimates land use in several categories. Figure 3 here provides some insights. It is noteworthy that total agricultural land in Ghana increased steadily from 1995 through 2005, but has leveled off since then. In the formalism that the FAO uses, the difference between the total agricultural land area and the crop land total is permanent pasture or meadow land. Further, the difference between the total crop land and the arable land total is land that is permanently cropped (such as for cocoa beans in the case of Ghana). And finally, the difference between the total arable land and that from which the national harvest of cereal crops is obtained is land devoted to the seasonal cultivation of vegetable and tuber crops. Therefore, as of 2016, staple cereal crops were produced in only 9.7% of the total land devoted to agriculture nationwide. So, in principle, should more demand for staple cereals be experienced, Ghana has a large headroom in agricultural land available to accommodate this.
Next, we move on to examine production/outputs. Seven crops are separately tracked — maize, rice, sorghum, cassava, sweet potatoes, plantains and yams. None of the last five listed here are regularly exported from Ghana at all; they are grown for domestic consumption as staple foods. Figures 4 and 5 below show the absolute tonnages and yields as taken from FAOSTAT records, at the national level, in the period 1995 through 2017. Six of the seven crops (all except sorghum) have seen steadily increased tonnages harvested, at steadily increasing yields, throughout this entire time span of more than twenty years. The very same datasets that are incorporated into Figures 4 and 5 were reused to produce Figures 6 and 7. But here, all of the variables have been normalized to a value of 100 at year 2000 (in the same way as in Figure 2). Then it is straightforward to examine the trends in direct comparison with population growth: basically, the total maize, rice, cassava, sweet potato, plantain and yam harvests have all outpaced the increase in the population. There are corresponding crop yield improvements (per Figures 5 and 7), but these are somewhat more modest, with all except that for cassava lagging somewhat behind the population growth. Overall, from all four Figures, there are no indications of single years where crop losses or failures have interrupted these trends in any substantial way, other than one isolated incident (the 2007 harvests of rice and sorghum).
Beyond production/outputs, it is also possible to look — again on a national level — at nutritional outcomes. What is set out here is actually the simplest derivation; from one set of output data alone. However, in order to view a complete picture, it is necessary to add in any imported staple food supplies. Figure 8 below provides a summary of itemized imports into Ghana, as of 2017; rice and wheat appear there as significant items. We were able to locate records for these specific imports in the FAOSTAT database. These were added to the totals (of domestically produced crops) contained in Figure 4 above, so as to arrive at a full total of staple foods available in Ghana over more than a twenty-year period. Food supplies originating from foreign sources as aid are not included. (The FAO does maintain and publish records of such aid programs. They reached a peak for Ghana in the 2000 timeframe, when approximately 5% of the domestic production of cereal crops was supplemented in this manner. That has fallen, year-by-year, to be less than 0.05% as of 2016.)
Figure 9 provides a graphical summary of the outcome obtained. Food energy available to Ghanaians reached a total, from eight staple sources, in raw form, of 5,099 kcal per capita per day in 2016. Of this, 680 kcal came from imported foodstuff (or 13% of the total, mostly from rice). In comparison, the FAO itself estimates that actual average actual dietary supply in Ghana amounted to 3,016 kcal per capita per day in the same year (with an actual average actual dietary supply adequacy of 135%), as cited here. However, from the series of food balance sheets which the FAO introduced and published separately through 2013 (only!), the food supply as of that year when summed for all crop-based sources is 4.697 kcal per capita per day. This compares to 4,630 kcal per capita per day by our estimation for staple foods only. It should be realized that not all of what is produced in-country may be utilized for human consumption alone. Some portion of the harvests of maize, yams, etc. is likely processed into animal feed (and would enter the human food chain then in the form of meat and dairy products).
More importantly though, the dataset plotted in Figure 9, consistent with what is presented above in Figures 4 through 7, again shows no dramatic reversal beyond that experienced in 2004 and 2005. For the last decade the trend has been solely one of overall improvement. Furthermore, Figure 10, which shows the contributions to total staple food supply from both domestic production and imported sources, on a relative basis, confirms that basic food availability has maintained an equity with population growth.
Summary and Observations
1. as to profiling agriculture using this analytical framework
Analyses have been published by others, estimating nutritional outcomes similar to those presented in Figure 9 here, based on data from the FAO. The most recent, to our knowledge, is here, covering the period 1986 thought 2010, and based on a methodology previously used for demonstration purposes featuring the single year 2000. In this prior work the accounting is also pursued on a country-by-country basis, but with the aim of making fully global projections (relative to estimates of total future population). The derived outcomes do exhibit quite distinct and substantial variations, year upon year, even within a time period where the FAO itself demonstrated a systematic fall in most indicators of undernutrition.
Our intention, on the other hand, is to probe such variations on as fine a scale as possible, based upon the newest of the FAO datasets. We have not as yet looked at any statistical analysis of the datasets simply presented in graphic form in this note. Others have undertaken investigations of that type for crop outcomes, as, for example, here. However, the characteristics of the specific outcomes presented in Figures 9 and 10 above suggest that some type of predictive analytic could be examined and compared with real-world data as the FAO reports it in subsequent years.
2. as to Ghana, acting as a first example
Ghana is included in the prior work published by Suweis and others here, but within a supplement to the paper itself. It falls into a collective category of “countries where food trade does not have a substantial impact on food availability”. This we can confirm. But the classification overlooks the issue of countries which are large exporters of non-staple crops and foods. It is our suspicion that such countries, including Ghana, take advantage of their export specializations to offset and/or subsidize the import of staple foods. So, in principle, it is possible that difficulties in the offshore cocoa product markets might indirectly influence “food availability” (according to the category definition Suweis and co-authors adopted).
On the other hand, Ghana has clearly recorded a substantial improvement in staple crop harvests over an extended time period. Just how remarkable this record is, inclusive of food imports, is shown in Figure 11 here. This supplements Figure 9 above, with the inclusion of profiles for Senegal, Mali and Morocco.
As to what can be learned from comparisons drawn from these specific results: we leave that for a subsequent post. It is apparent though that the outcome for all four nations is poorer overall (than average) in specific years; 1997, 2000, and 2007 for example. But it is never substantially better for all four in concert in any given year. For overall reference, the USDA report quoted in the introduction to this post includes the following: “the amount of food required to allow all food-insecure people to reach the caloric target of 2,100 calories per person per day”.
There appears little doubt that a major contributor to Ghana’s current level of success stems from the early expansion in land usage. Recent international surveys (as here), as well as national statistics (such as are available, from 2016 and 2017, here and here respectively), all confirm that link. In the former case, the World Bank report also notes that new agricultural land incorporated into the total available is becoming dominated by larger farms (in 1992, 60.7% of the total/national cultivated area involved individual farms smaller than 5 ha in area, whereas, by 2013, 51.1% was contributed by those larger than 5 ha, inclusive of a three-fold increase in the number of farms between 10 and 20 ha total). According to the Ministry of Agriculture documentation, much of this came about by the conversion of savanna land for arable farming. And a new nationwide program (Planting for Food and Jobs) seeks to maintain these improvements in the short-term future (as summarized by the World Bank here). Certainly, these changes have been secured despite there being only limited progress with initiatives in land consolidation (as recently discussed here). It is noteworthy also that a very recent, comprehensive and independent report, covering issues of nutrition on a global basis, ranks Ghana highly when evaluating progress against the following targets: child overweight, child wasting, child stunting, exclusive breastfeeding, diabetes among women, diabetes among men, anemia in women of reproductive age, obesity among women and obesity among men (reference here and here). Nevertheless, according to the FAO there remains room for additional gains (as per Figure 12 below) in even basic nutrition.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. It contains content © 2018 FAO and also material taken from Karen Thome, Birgit Meade, Kamron Daugherty and Cheryl Christensen, International Food Security Assessment, 2018–2028, GFA-29, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, June 2018. Graphics included herein as taken from The Observatory of Economic Complexity, by Alexander Simoes, is separately licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
