South Africa is food secure at a national level as a result of domestic production and sufficient generation of foreign exchange from exports to enable the importing of shortfalls or products that are not produced domestically. National food security is increasingly reliant on the ability to import products that domestic producers cannot produce competitively in comparison with heavily subsidised producers elsewhere in the world. Given growing balance of payments problems (with the value of imports far outstripping the value of exports even with a strong rand) this is a dangerous basis for a national food security strategy.

Other countries in Africa face an even worse situation. The gap between food production and imports and food needs is estimated to be 187.5 million tons for sub-Saharan Africa in 2020 with the region being the only one that will have a predicted growth in the number of malnourished children between 1990 and 2020 (Conway 1997, 28 & 29). Most countries in southern Africa are heavily reliant on food aid to meet the basic food needs of their populations.

In all SADC countries at local level there are severe shortages of food among some rural and peri-urban communities. The high levels of unemployment are still indications that even where food is readily available, it is not necessarily accessible to all that need it because of shortages of disposable income.

There are a number of intervention strategies that governments use to improve food security. These can be grouped into three basic categories:

1. The provision of food directly to the poor;
2. Supporting access to food markets in the form of promotion of income generation including income transfers;
3. Support for direct production of food by the poor;

In addition there is crosscutting support for nutritional improvement.

There is much critique of food aid as a stand alone intervention, in that it creates dependency, it permits local politicians to use food aid as a tool for retain power and control, and it leads to the destruction of food systems from production through to retailing. However, it is apparent that the mere elimination of these programmes without more robust food systems in place will lead to even greater food insecurity and hardship for the poorest, including child-headed households. The key question is how to provide food in such a way that it is integrated into longer-term development interventions, opens up opportunities to local populations, households and individuals and contributes to the structural reduction of vulnerability to food insecurity.

Promotion of employment, income generation, social protection and cash transfers are the second major intervention and are designed to enhance the ability of beneficiaries to purchase food from the market. Some countries have active programmes to improve economic growth and ensure it reaches the poor, e.g through development of micro and small enterprises. Most countries in the region have policies in place to build social protection as a component of food security. Real or perceived lack of resources to sustain programmes emanating from these policies has retarded their operationalisation. While social protection systems have potential value in building and strengthening household and individual assets, their application to food security rely uncritically on food markets and leave the distorted systems of food production and distribution untransformed. The way access to food markets is conceptualised does not involve a transformation of these markets in favour of the poor over time, or their downgrading so that access to food is not premised only on having enough money to buy it.

The challenge is how to link up the sets of measures for prevention and protection on the one hand and measures for transformation and promotion on the other. The linkages have the same characteristics as those that connect the governance macro to the meso and micro in that at the higher level the systems manage total dependency whereas at the micro level systems have to be self-sustaining. The sets of measures should not be seen or handled separately and in isolation.

Support for food production involves supporting the widening of the base of producers, not only for commercial production, and includes support for low external input sustainable agriculture (LEISA). The range of support required is wide, including resources such as tools, seed, water, land, fertiliser/compost, credit, training and skills development in appropriate production methods, financial management, production planning administrative/organisational development and management, and marketing. There is a closed circuit relationship between inputs, production systems, marketing and processing and financing (see Figure 1).

Most countries in southern Africa have policies and even laws regarding these interventions. Yet for a number of reasons implementation lags. These include a disconnection between policy makers, implementers (government and non-government institutions) and beneficiaries. There is usually little or no participation in the design and implementation of policies by direct beneficiaries, and this leads to passivity. Another reason why the policies are not implemented is the decay or collapse of extension services that previously were run by the state but since liberalisation have not been maintained. The role of extension is critical in linking research and practice, constantly improving and updating the menu of options available to producers and working with farmers to develop practical ways to carry out options that producers have selected.

From the above it is apparent that participatory interventions should have a clearly defined transformative component to them, since hunger and food insecurity are structural in character and structures are no more and no less than codified human interactions. It becomes clear that the sustainable livelihoods analysis (SLA) framework offers a valuable conceptual starting point for considering how food security interventions can both protect and strengthen livelihoods and for suggesting where Khanya-aicdd may make the most effective contribution.