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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The Political Economy of Urban Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa
Author:Maxwell, Daniel G.ISNI
Year:1999
Periodical:World Development
Volume:27
Issue:11
Period:November
Pages:1939-1953
Language:English
Geographic terms:Subsaharan Africa
Ghana
Uganda
Subjects:food supply
food security
urban areas
Urbanization and Migration
Development and Technology
Economics and Trade
Health and Nutrition
External link:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(99)00101-1
Abstract:Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, urban food problems in Africa commanded political attention, the nature of urban food insecurity in the 1990s is such that it has tended to lose political importance. This is largely because in the 1970s, the problem was one of outright food shortages and rapid price changes that affected large portions of the urban population simultaneously. The impact of structural adjustment, continued rapid growth, and an increase in poverty make urban food insecurity in the 1990s primarily a problem of access by the urban poor. Under circumstances where the urban poor spend a large portion of their total income on food, urban poverty rapidly translates into food insecurity. The lack of formal safety nets, and the shifting of responsibility for coping with food insecurity away from the State towards the individual and household level has tended to atomize and muffle any political response to this new urban food insecurity. This paper first briefly reviews urban food insecurity and generates a set of empirical questions for an analysis of food and livelihood security in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa, and then examines historial and contemporary evidence from Kampala (Uganda) and Accra (Ghana) to suggest some tentative conclusions. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum.
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