The Cost of Food and Food Security

In the United States, the average family spends between 7 to 10% of their household income on food.  We seldom grow our own food as a family unit (less than 2% of the American population is directly involved in agriculture - the growing of food on a farm or ranch), so we buy it.  In Europe, this percentage grows slightly to a number around 12 - 18% of a family’s income being designated for food.  

Care to guess the percentage in the “developing world?”  Think: what do people throughout South America, Asia, Africa, and other less well-to-do regions of the world pay in order to feed themselves.  And more specifically, what do the poorest of the poor spend on their food (those people on only a couple of acres of land)?

The costs lie somewhere in between 50% to 80%.  That means over half, sometimes as much as 8 out of 10 dollars, of a household’s income is spent on food in these areas – either through buying the food or through producing it themselves.  As my Peace Corps supervisor Donald Phiri says, “How can we begin to talk about saving money, when it is nearly all being spent on food?”  We can’t.  This cost has to come down, yet it doesn’t seem like it will anytime soon.

Roadside stands (just made up of small scraps of wood) serve as selling points for locally grown foods.  Here, men buy bananas and sweet potatoes from women.

World-wide there is plenty of food being grown to feed the rich and the poor alike.  The World Health Organization recommends that the average human should consume 2,100 calories per day.  World food production is something more near 2,800 calories per day – we could all be fat.  The issue is unequal and inadequate distribution: bad roads, bad policies, short shelf-life, etc.  Imagine all of the logistics, infrastructure, and time needed to ship food to the furthest, most in need corners of the world.   Somalia?  No way… they’ve got pirates and land-loving crazies to deal with.  Some tiny village in Cambodia?  I don’t think so.  Djibouti?  Probably not - where is that on a map?  Zambia?  Nope, they had a hard enough time delivering ballot boxes during this past election.  

This lack of transportation and distribution means the gaps need to be filled by local farmers.  That's not always easily done.

When the price of food is high there is hunger, and equally when the price of producing food is high there is hunger.  Poverty and its offspring called hunger are vicious and it’s tough for the poorest of the poor, the most in need to break their grip.

Small, impromptu markets like this can be found all over Zambia.  They're mostly made up of seasonal fruits and vegetables.

One report from 2009 stated that the bottom 20% of Zambian farmers - the poorest of the poor - spend nearly 30% above the market price of a bag of maize to produce that maize.  For example, if a 50 kilogram (just over 100 lbs.) bag of maize is bought at about $10 per bag, these farmers were spending nearly $13.5 per bag to produce that maize.  How is that even possible?  I’m not entirely sure.  Whether they’re going to sell it or consume it themselves the cost is ridiculously high.

Hunger is an incredibly dynamic issue with a lot of drivers causing it to cling to life, instead of languishing where everyone sincerely hopes it’ll end up. 

The cost of food security and alleviating hunger at the local level is different from community to community and family to family, but one thing is certain for all involved parties - it's expensive and it seems unlikely to become cheaper anytime soon.  

With such a high cost to the poorest of the poor to feed themselves it makes future upwards movement from one social class to another (subsistence farmer to emerging farmer and so on) nearly impossible.  A family has little to no expendable income to spend on investments, post-secondary school, or other life-improving means.  The cost of food and food security is spectacularly skewed against the poorest of the poor and the most hungry.  

How to solve this?  I don't know.  Whatever the solution is must involve bringing that 50 - 80% of income down to a more manageable and realistic rate... anything less than that just won't work.