As Zimbabwe headed into the elections on the 23rd and 24th August, the government were keen to present a positive picture of the country’s food security status. One way that sought to do this was by renaming the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee, which has published annual reports on rural and urban food security since being established in 2002, the Zimbabwe Livelihoods Assessment Committee. Whether the renaming will stick is hard to tell, the latest reports were published under the committee’s original name and its make-up appears not to have changed; ZimVAC still includes a mix of government departments, universities, UN agencies, and national and international NGOs.
Without wishing to step too far into the realm of politics, the change in name does prompt the question “is Zimbabwe less vulnerable to food insecurity”? Reading the wording of the ZimVAC reports, one might be tempted to answer in the affirmative. There has been a gradual reduction in the use of terms such as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘vulnerability’. For example, in the reports published shortly after the establishment of ZimVAC, the urban and rural reports for 2003, the combined terms were used 80 and 36 times respectively. Compare that to a mere 23 and 6 times for the equivalent 2023 reports. It is difficult to know how to interrupt this shift in language, especially as the earlier reports were much more text heavy, and the latter ones appear to let the data do the talking.
So, the question, then, is what do the data tell us about the vulnerability of Zimbabweans to food insecurity? To answer this question, it is important to define what is meant by vulnerability. Here, Neil Adger (2006) offers a wide-ranging discussion of the term and points to the many traditions from which vulnerability has come to be understood. Adger’s main goal is to better understand the complexity of the term, which he suggests is generally understood as the susceptibility to harm and an associated incapacity to respond to adversity.
A much earlier discussion of vulnerability, also helps to understand the problem at hand. Writing on the sociology and geography of food insecurity, Hans Bohle, Thomas Downing and Michael Watts remark, and I quote them here, that “the most vulnerable individuals, groups, classes and regions are those most exposed to perturbations, who possess the most limited coping capacity and suffer the most from the impact of a crisis or environmental perturbations” (1994, p. 38). Put differently, the most vulnerable are those people and communities, places and regions, most exposed to crises, with inadequate capacity to cope and limited resources to recover. Whichever way we define vulnerability, it seems reasonable to state that many Zimbabweans remain vulnerable to food insecurity.
The facts of the ZimVAC reports speak for themselves. For example, the latest reports suggest that formal employment amongst urban dwellers remains stubbornly low at 24.1%, while employment in the informal sector remains high at 36.9%. While the figures are an improvement on previous years, the overall reduction in unemployment (49% to 38.6%) is explained as much by a growth in informal sector employment as it is by employment in the formal sector. This may reflect the ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit of Zimbabweans, as the authors of ZimVAC suggest, but it also points to a weakness in the economy and one that leaves many exposed to precarious and low-paid work.
There are other data too which illustrate the extent of people’s vulnerability in times of crisis, including the low levels of social protection and the sources of it where it does exist. Drawing again from the latest ZimVAC assessment of urban vulnerability, the figures are equally worrying. Mashonaland Central had the highest proportion of households receiving any form of social support (35%) and Matabeleland South the lowest (15%); Harare was somewhere in the middle with 21% of households receiving support and Bulawayo a little higher at 27%. Delving more deeply into these figures reveals that folk in Mashonaland Central received more support from the government (28.1%) than from informal social protection within and without the country and that the opposite is true for all other parts of the country.
I’ve not delved into the equivalent rural report here, nor gone into the full detail of the urban findings. However, even these two sets of figures reveal a great deal about Zimbabwean’s vulnerability to food insecurity if it is understood in terms of the risks of being exposed to crises and the incapacity of responding to them. Analysis of food inflation by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation highlighted, for example, that the country experienced triple-digit food inflation rates for the majority of 2022 (FAO, 2022). In such a context, it is a fairly obvious that people in precarious employment and with access to only limited formal and informal social protection, will find access to food difficult; even in circumstances where food is available.
This is exactly what the ZimVAC Urban Livelihoods Assessment Report for 2023 revealed: 29% of the population is food insecure, with many urban districts reporting levels significantly higher. Returning to the idea that Zimbabwe is food secure, it quite patently is not and that situation is being exacerbated by factors within and without the government’s control. So, the question is why change the name of a committee that is dedicated to helping co-ordinate the government’s response to its constitutional and policy commitment to ensuring food and nutrition security for all? The answer to this question can only lie in the realm of politics, and only time will tell whether the change makes a difference to the reports produced by ZimVAC.
Whatever happens, changing the name will do little help those who, at the time of writing, are heading into another year of food-related crisis.
Professor Tim Brown 