Persistent Chronic Food Insecurity and Mitigation Challenges in Sahelian Africa: Can Lessons from ‘Targeted’ Social Protection Policies in the Horn of Africa be of help?

Abstract

This is a research article on the persistence of chronic food insecurity and mitigation challenges in Sahelian sub-Saharan Africa. This policy-oriented research sets out to address the question: what accounts for the persistent challenges to the mitigation of chronic food insecurity of the poor and critically vulnerable in the Sahel region of Sub-Saharan Africa and can targeted social protection policies as applied in other chronic food insecure countries in the Horn of Africa such as Ethiopia and Kenya be of help? Building on a rigorous critical review of literature on Food Insecurity Sub-Saharan Africa and leaning on content analysis of secondary empirical evidence and informed by the political-economy famine theory, the paper arrives at important findings. The findings support the hypothesis that the persistent chronic food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition crisis, which the poor and critically vulnerable people of the Sahel are plunged into, is not a crisis of food availability per se, but that of food accessibility, compounded by high state fragility, violent conflicts and dysfunctional democratic institutions. As such, the paper vehemently argues that the persistent chronic food insecurity, of the poor and most vulnerable of the Sahel region can be successfully mitigated only insofar as the international community in collaboration with Sahelian governments come to the consensus that the root causes of the appalling food insecurity situation are more structural— linked to a ?poverty crisis‘ of food accessibility (food demand) rather than mere availability (food emergencies supply) that requires long term sustained efforts through social protection policies adaptive to the politico-economic realities of the Sahel Region and putting the poor and most vulnerable, (as evident in other chronically food insecure countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya in the Horn of Africa) at the centre of their own individual and collective food security concern

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