Now, new research from the recent international conference on 'HIV/AIDS and Food
and Nutrition Security', held earlier this month in Durban, South Africa, has
provided greater insight into how farming communities have been affected. The
three-day conference, organized by the Washington-based International Food
Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), brought together policymakers, donors and
researchers to develop strategies for improving and expanding the response to
HIV/AIDS and food security. While some of the research presented at the
conference supported conventional wisdom on the massive impact of HIV/AIDS on
livelihoods, "more research put on the table [during the conference] is
forcing us to change the way we look at things," Stuart Gillespie,
conference director and senior research fellow at IFPRI, told PlusNews.
In his keynote address Dr Tony Barnett from the London School of Economics
questioned current thinking on the effects of the epidemic and called for more
evidence on what was happening to farming systems. He warned that "one size
will not fit all" when developing responses to HIV/AIDS in rural
communities, and there was a need to recognize the complex nuances involved.
MORE EVIDENCE ON IMPACT
CARE International's Michael Drinkwater presented the preliminary findings of
one of the few longitudinal studies of the impact of HIV/AIDS on rural
livelihoods, conducted at three sites in Zambia. The longitudinal study, done at
10-year intervals, analyzed 'clusters' - a group of households with complex
interrelationships - and found that not all clusters were experiencing adverse
effects. Active links between urban and rural household members, as well as the
position of the deceased in the household, could influence the impact of the
disease.
The cluster methodology used in the longitudinal
study created a more "refined understanding" of how gender, age and
social economic status were affected by AIDS and would allow for "a more
holistic programmatic approach", Drinkwater said. He noted that programmes
would need to reconsider the formulation of rural prevention strategies, as the
survey found that "happy couple" HIV/AIDS prevention messages
targeting the family were "totally inappropriate for rural areas",
where the cultural context of marriage was different.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
HIV/AIDS could not be isolated as a poverty-inducing factor - in most cases,
animal diseases and official agricultural policies had caused greater shock to
the households, the study noted. This was later reiterated by a Michigan State
University report on HIV/AIDS and the agricultural sector in Eastern and
Southern Africa, which also found that the initial wealth of the households, the
sex of the deceased, and the ability of the household to attract new members
mitigated the effects of HIV/AIDS. Professor Thomas Jayne from Michigan State
University pointed out that "it's difficult to disentangle the AIDS impact
from everything else affecting agriculture". The cassava 'boom' in Southern
Africa was a case in point: according to the 'new variant famine hypothesis',
the impact of HIV/AIDS had caused high-value, highly nutritious crops, such as
cereals and oilseeds, to be replaced by less nutritious ones like cassava.
But the new variant famine had failed to take into account that "major
changes in agricultural policy have occurred ... [and] veered some farming
systems in the region toward tuber crops". These policy changes had reduced
the "financial profitability of growing maize ... and had shifted cropping
incentives towards other food crops, such as cassava", Jayne said in his
study. The report argued that "conventional wisdom encouraging prioritization
of labour-saving technology or crops has been over-generalized, although labour-saving
agricultural technologies may be appropriate for certain types of households and
regions." "We realize we are going to tread on a lot of toes ... this
new information might not be compatible with current programmes, but this
implies a shift is needed," Jayne told PlusNews.
Existing thinking, which viewed cassava as a "non-nutritious" food
crop, had also ignored local community responses, said Dr Linley Chiwona-Karltun
from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Karltun's study of
community responses to cassava in Malawi revealed that the communities were
making use of the whole plant - not just the root. "No-one has looked at
how communities are using this so-called poor source of nutrition, and the
nutritional benefits of the whole cassava plant," she told PlusNews.
PAINFUL DECISIONS
Hunger was also driving rural households into engaging in risky sexual practices
to survive, a study of smallholder farmers in three rural villages in Malawi's
Lilongwe district revealed. During the pre-harvest lean months, smallholder
farmers traditionally relied on 'ganyu' labour - the exchange of their labour
for goods or cash from better off households. However, the study discovered that
ganyu opportunities were increasingly hard to find in rural communities, and
women were often forced to venture into the outskirts of the capital, Lilongwe,
to work in gardens and factories, and sometimes selling themselves. The
pressures of caring for terminally ill family members, while trying to make ends
meet in a country staggering under the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and food
shortages, had forced many poor Zambian households to discriminate against the
AIDS patient without even realizing it.
"There's only so much people can cope with - these decisions are based on
limited resources and their actions are driven by this - but people living with
HIV/AIDS are experiencing it as stigma," Virginia Bond, principal
investigator for a study on stigma in Zambia, commissioned by the International
Centre for Research on Women (ICRW), told PlusNews. The dimensions poverty
brought to stigma had been largely ignored, Bond noted. "The concept [of
stigma] should not be isolated from other social, political and economic
processes and phenomena stigma occurs within these," she told delegates at
the three-day conference.
ACTING DESPITE INADEQUATE EVIDENCE
On the final day of the conference, AIDS activist Hans Binswanger warned that a
lack of evidence could no longer be used as an excuse for not designing
effective programmes or holding back on action. "Of course there are
uncertainties, but these are being manipulated, and distracting from the obvious
things that are required," he said. Binswanger stressed that local,
community-driven development was crucial in programmes targeting HIV/AIDS and
food security. "Only at this level can programmes be adapted to local
conditions by those who know them," he added. Although there had been
small-scale community-driven success stories dealing with food and nutrition
security and the epidemic, there was "not enough large-scale action,"
said Gillespie from IFPRI.
He noted that "we are not talking about starting from scratch with new
programmes", but there was still a need for more knowledge of what the
actual situation was on the ground. Governments could do something as simple as
applying an "HIV/AIDS lens" when looking at existing agricultural
policies to review what they were doing from an AIDS perspective.
Nevertheless, he admitted, "there is no blueprint there is no standard
magic bullet intervention."
(Source: PLUSNEWS, April 26, 2005)
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