Since the signing of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by world leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, the gravity of poverty around the world and the urgency for more specific initiatives aimed at reducing it have greatly informed general development discourse and practices.

Among the various goals and targets of this worldwide initiative, hunger eradication certainly occupies a special place, because hunger more than other aspects of poverty directly erodes human dignity and undermines the foundations of human society. At least one-sixth of humanity is still threatened by vulnerability to hunger. Food insecurity dramatically affects millions of people both in rural areas and in urban centers of poor countries, with unacceptable human, economic, social and political consequences.

There is abundant literature concerning poverty and hunger in the world, with a continuously growing number of reports, books and websites. We hope that this new publication will make a specific contribution. While analyzing the new conceptual context of the analysis of food insecurity and extending the debate on food insecurity beyond conventional boundaries, this book highlights the specific roles that emerging democratic local governments have to play in reducing food insecurity. It also calls for a set of combined and complementary initiatives in the areas of local economic development, local environmental governance and social protection.

The publication focuses on Africa and the specific situation of food insecurity for millions of African women and men. In fact, some of its observations and recommendations are also pertinent in other contexts worldwide. The book primarily aims at stimulating further exchange and debate within the UN system and among our development partners and our national government counterparts. Its main message is that democratic processes, public reforms, fiscal measures and economic growth can be sustainable only if they do secure the livelihoods of millions of poor people, particularly in terms of reducing their vulnerability to food crises.

The United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) is a UN agency whose investments foster a people-centred approach to development, promote good governance and reinforce human and institutional capacities. Its also aims to reduce poverty in the Least Development Countries (LDCs) by supporting pro-poor delivery of social services and infrastructure, promoting sustainable management of natural resources, and stimulating economic development at the local level. UNCDF recognizes the importance of participation of civil society as a whole at the local level and of new forms of partnership between the public and private sectors in order to allow local populations to identify solutions that address the local context.

We hope that this contribution will stimulate further action-oriented debate on the critical linkages between local governance and the reduction of poverty. This debate should discuss the need to integrate initiatives aimed at stimulating agricultural production, improving productivity of the resource base, supporting broad-based economic growth, enhancing the business investment climate, sustaining local drivers of growth, and reducing the vulnerability of the poorest sections of society to food crises through appropriate social protection measures.

I would like to acknowledge and thank Mr. Angelo Bonfiglioli, UNCDF Technical Advisor, for initiating and writing this publication. It is the third installment in his series of books on poverty-related issues (the first two being Empowering the Poor, which focused on local governance, and Lands of the Poor, which addressed issues related to the decentralized management of natural resources). All these publications were made possible by the support provided by several UNCDF colleagues, among them Kadmiel Wekwete, Roger Shotton, Ulrik Kristensen, Philippe Zysset and Adam Rogers.

Richard Weingarten
Executive Secretary
United Nations Capital Development Fund

In recent years there have been important conceptual shifts in the thinking on food security as understanding of the diverse causes of food crises and the general context of mass famine and vulnerability to food crises has grown. Such causes include demographic growth, increasing urbanization and rural-to-urban migration, failed agricultural and market macro-policies, the effects of globalization, the spread of HIV/AIDS and the depletion of asset bases due to civil wars, natural disasters and other factors.

Socio-economic analysis has revealed that rural households can only undertake productive activities and adopt a range of livelihood strategies (from simple coping or adaptive measures to fully fledged growth or investment strategies) aimed at producing sustainable outcomes if they are endowed with significant assets (or forms of capital).

The recent evolution in thinking on food security has had an impact on the food security policies pursued by major international stakeholders, which have taken on board key concepts such as household vulnerability, food security, entitlement, sustainable livelihoods, capabilities and capital. The new conceptual frameworks seem to provide better insights into both the food security situation and potential policy measures, pointing up the need to replace a single focus on lack of food with methods such as the livelihood approach (or asset-based approach), which employs a range of overlapping and comprehensive measures in order to balance capabilities and assets and address livelihood failures.

Unlike the conventional 'food first' approach, which treats food security as an isolated need, the livelihood approach emphasizes the multidimensionality of food insecurity (low productivity, weak and unaccountable institutions, lack of access to productive resources, market failure, inadequate policies, etc.). The advantage of this approach is that it highlights the need to better understand all the various factors influencing local livelihoods in order to succeed in improving the availability, access to and utilization of food.

In terms of policy implications, adopting the livelihood approach as a general framework for food security also means that development measures are sustainable only if they effectively strengthen the capacity of rural households to preserve, acquire and increase various forms of productive and non-productive assets (land or livestock; education and

social networks, etc.), carry out adequate activities and adopt appropriate strategies in order to achieve their own priority goals within their own timeframe.

Food insecurity is not a stand-alone issue. Therefore, an appropriate food security-related policy should be the result of a set of policies aimed at stimulating agricultural production, supporting broad-based economic growth (through job creation, for instance) and reducing the vulnerability of the poorest sections of society to food crises through social protection programmes that include specific safety nets.

In short, poverty and food security can only be explained and sustainably addressed by a broad range of technical, economic, social and institutional factors.

In the current context of ongoing decentralization, legitimate and democratically elected local government authorities have been devolved a growing role in the design, programming, planning and implementation of comprehensive local development initiatives. An important and innovative paradigm shift would better highlight the new challenges facing sub-national governments, which should no longer be seen exclusively in terms of providing social services, but increasingly as the facilitators and brokers of new forms of partnership between the public and private sectors in capacity building, institutional development and economic investment. This would help strengthen the livelihoods of poverty-stricken and food insecure households by bolstering their assets and capabilities, supporting livelihood strategies, opening up employment opportunities and supporting the market.

According to the precepts of ‘good governance’, local authorities are not supposed to act on their own, but to establish inclusive, horizontal forms of cooperation with other local governments, consult with technical line departments, and introduce two-way vertical mechanisms of accountability with central governments and civil society community institutions. The success and sustainability of the local governance paradigm and performance of policies supporting sustainable livelihoods depend on local authorities playing a key catalytic role through extensive webs of interdependency and collective frameworks for action. The convening power of local governments and other local public agencies should be harnessed to bring together all local stakeholders and promote a more integrated, self-reinforcing economic process at the local level.

Sub-national governments can play a cross-sector role in three major arenas at the local level: the environment, the economy and social protection, where related activities could have a tremendous effect on local assets and livelihood strategies/activities, and thus on food security.

• Local governments need to be committed to support collective initiatives for better local environmental governance and to have the capacity to do so, in order to improve local conditions governing access to and use of natural resources, and to increase the productivity of the resource base through the rehabilitation, protection and management of natural resources (including agricultural intensification).
• Local governments should be fully committed to local economic development, and have the capacity to sustain a range of initiatives to improve and enhance the business investment climate, identify local drivers of growth and stimulate/support an entrepreneurial mentality. These initiatives should increase incomes, create jobs, support efficient markets (for both producers and consumers) and sustain the diversification of rural economies. They will also have a direct impact on the sustainability – and ultimately, the food security – of poor households.
• Finally, local authorities also need to provide parallel and complementary support for different social protection measures aimed at preserving the key productive assets of poorest households, enhancing their survival and supporting their diversification. (The concept of ‘social protection’ marks a shift from considering ‘safety nets’ merely as a support for people below a certain level of income or subsistence, towards a broader vision that addresses the economic growth of the poorest sections of society).

UNCDF is well positioned to make an important contribution in supporting this amplification of local government roles through its Local Development component. Its current comparative advantages would be further enhanced by integrating the livelihood security dimension into its present strategic model, the so-called ‘local development programme’ or LDP.

The leadership of local democratic institutions needs to be enhanced within a framework that stresses the key linkages between markets, assets (natural, financial and human assets and social capital), secure livelihoods and access to food.

Provided they have effective powers and sufficient fiscal resources, local governments should be able to make a difference through comprehensive and sustainable efforts to improve rural livelihoods in Africa, thereby reducing the vulnerability of millions of households to recurrent food crises and the unbearable risks of famine and mass starvation.