Below is the introduction for “Hunger as a Fatal Strategy: A Zambian Case Study” by Terry Leahy and Debbie Jean Brown.
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I have been tempted to call this chapter, the absent goat. I make regular contributions to an international NGO that deals with food security and impoverishment in the developing world. Every few months, I am invited to contribute by “buying a goat” for an impoverished community in Africa. The idea is that a smallholder rural family can breed from their goat and sell the offspring, milking the goat at the same time. What I always wonder about is why the smallholder rural family in question does not already have a goat. The strategies being promoted by the NGO are hardly rocket science. Why are villagers so slow to implement these strategies without outside assistance? In fact, rural villages in Eastern and Southern Africa do have goats. But it is true that most families do not have a goat. So why are poor smallholder families unable to raise themselves out of goat poverty? We could ask the same questions about numerous other issues. Why are villagers short of vitamin A when traditional African cultures made use of a variety of wild and introduced weedy vegetables that are still available today? Why do they only get a decent meal of protein every few months when every house owns a small flock of chickens?
This chapter is an attempt to answer these kinds of questions. While a large part of this book is devoted to explaining solutions that can work to relieve food insecurity, this chapter is about the social context in which food insecurity is the most likely outcome. It is about the social landscape in which food security projects have to work. While most discussions of poverty see it as something imposed from the outside, which requires outside assistance to manage, the following discussion attempts a shift of focus. What are the poor doing and thinking to contribute to food insecurity? In making this analysis I am intending to use the concept of “fatal strategy” as employed by Jean Baudrillard (1990; 1983). A fatal strategy is a form of resistance to power. The fatalistic refusal to do anything about an impossible situation ends up by harming the oppressed. A related response of the oppressed to power is to submit by excessive and arbitrary conformity – Baudrillard’s “hyperconformity” (1983: 48). Both these ideas make some kind of sense of what is a very puzzling situation on the ground in Eastern and Southern African villages – food insecurity is ubiquitous and yet the resources that could enable an effective food strategy are also present.
Of course the danger of such an approach is to end up “blaming the victim”. I have often been told that the problems with the poor in African villages are their own fault. In many an earnest conversation, I would be informed that “our people over this side [meaning the other side of the world from Australia] are lazy”. I think this a very inadequate explanation of what is going wrong. If anything, the strong commitment to hard work in the market economy is a key part of the problems with food security in the villages. Even the commitment to hard work on village food production can be misplaced in ways that only make things worse. Too much faith in development, entrepreneurship and hard work can actually be damaging. This chapter will explain such a paradoxical statement.
While there is always a danger that you end up blaming the victim, the opposite problem also has to be acknowledged. You can end up ignoring what the poor are actually doing. How do they react to poverty and what are their strategies? Only by understanding this can you really begin to get an idea of what is going wrong and what might be done to fix it.
This chapter will be devoted to a small corner of the Eastern Plateau of Zambia, but the issues that I identify here are mirrored in other villages all over Eastern and Southern Africa. A more general sense of this context will come out of the book as a whole. To begin with it makes sense to look at a particular set of people and problems.
The land of the Eastern Plateau of Zambia is mostly flat with low hills. The rainfall is about 1000 mm per year and almost all of that falls in the four months from December to March. Rural households are concentrated in village settlements of up to a hundred households (Phiria et al. 2004; Vail 1977). I came here just before Christmas of 2010 as the guest of a small NGO, which operates with the support of churches and Rotary clubs around the world. I will call this the Kai NGO. Living there I was within easy walking distance of a village, the Nyandane village, where food insecurity problems were very real. One of the staff at the centre, Patience, spoke good English and came from this village. She was able to introduce me to some of her relatives and we interviewed them and other villagers. I also interviewed staff at the centre. They had grown up in villages near the centre and spent years working on village projects. While there, I met up with Debbie Jean Brown, a researcher from the USA. She was staying at Kai too, and her research was with women in the Tumba village, also close by. She was interested in finding out what gave these women joy in in their life. I was intrigued by this project and we quickly realized we could share our research data and ideas. So some of the quotes in this chapter come from her interviews and some from my interviews.
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