Zimbabwe’s transport network was first established as a part of the racialised infrastructure underpinning the extractive economic and development policies of white settler colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With rail transport initially prioritised by Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, the development of a ‘modern’ road network only came into focus following the country’s transfer into British colonial rule in 1923 and the subsequent agitation of white farmers who were keen to find alternatives to an increasingly expensive rail transport network as well as to enhance their everyday mobility (Mlambo 1994). In the decades that followed, Mlambo describes the gradual construction of a road network that could be described as a ‘fairly modern highway system’ by the 1940s and as being ‘good’ in the decade that followed the country’s Independence in 1980, but which remained largely confined to routes established under colonialism and white minority rule (Mlambo 2014). More recently, the country’s road infrastructure, like other aspects of the country’s transport and other infrastructure, had declined into further disrepair and was described by the current president, President Mnangagwa, as being in a ‘state of disaster’ on February 9th, 2021. The reasons for this decline are not the focus for this paper; rather, the programme of infrastructure repair enacted by Mnangagwa’s government and its relevance to the country’s food and nutrition security are its main focal points.
Here, the connection between infrastructure and food and nutrition security is a vital one. As Battersby and co-authors (2023) argue, better understanding is required of how infrastructures interact to enhance food and nutrition security as well as to potentially amplify further insecurity. The authors make this argument, in part, because of a limitation they identify within extant research especially as it relates to questions of urban, as opposed to rural, food and nutrition security. As they state, the research remains ‘patchy’ and responses to it are ‘small and largely project based,’ failing, they believe, to address the food system or urban policy directly (2023: 4). We concur with this assessment, though tend not to view the urban and rural in such dichotomous or binary terms. It is undoubtedly the case, as these and other authors argue (e.g., Crush & Riley 2018; Battersby & Watson 2019; Crush et al. 2020), that in countries across the Global South, including Zimbabwe, emphasis has been placed on the issue of rural food and nutrition security, especially in the policy and programming of governmental and non-governmental agencies (e.g., WFP, FAO and IFAD). Moreover, there remains a tendency to view solutions to food and nutrition security as ones best addressed by improving agricultural production through, for example, the technological solutions offered by the new green revolution (Abdulai 2022). This does require the kind of rebalancing that has been argued for but not in our view the occlusion of the rural, especially when food and nutrition security amongst highly mobile urban populations relies so heavily on people’s ongoing interconnectedness with and access to rural areas.
Bearing this in mind, we focus on three dimensions of the literature in the section that follows: firstly, we further develop our understanding of food and nutrition security as well as the relatively recent call to extend definitions of food security to more explicitly embrace ‘agency’ as an addition to the existing four pillars (HLPE 2020). Although such an extension would not necessarily mean a significant shift in understanding and approach – agency is already recognised to play a significant role in enhancing people’s access to, and utilisation of, food – its inclusion in official definitions is consequential. This is primarily because of the influential role that definitions such as those promoted by international organisations like the FAO and World Bank Group have on national policy and programmes. Secondly, we address debates that have brought food security and nutrition into closer dialogue with each other. Here, we not only acknowledge the vital role that improved nutrition plays in helping to address the social determinants of health but so too the ongoing failure to adequately respond to the nutritional disadvantage that many, and especially the most vulnerable and marginalised people, are exposed to. Thirdly, we consider in a little further detail the aforementioned scholarship relating to the importance of addressing urban food security through an infrastructural lens. In so doing, we seek to make space for a programme of research which explores the potential as well as the pitfalls for infrastructure repair programmes such as those recently enacted in Zimbabwe as responses to food and nutrition insecurity.
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Professor Tim Brown 