WELL, it has been an interesting week for those of us abroad as we were titillated by developments back home as reported by the plethora of newspapers and news websites.
If there is one thing you have to love about Zimbabweans, they do not shy away from debate.
However, this entire drama should not take focus away from the subject of food security.
In its little corner of the world, Zimbabwe has an opportunity to re-capture its former glory as the bread basket of southern Africa.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, food insecurity is a situation of ‘limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways’.
The prevalence of food insecurity has been relative in the US since the 2008 economic recession.
An Economic Research Service report released in 2013 estimated that in 2012:
l 14,5 percent (17,6 million) of US households were food insecure at some point.
l 49 million people lived in food-insecure households.
l 12,4 million adults lived in households with very low food security.
l 8,3 million children lived in food-insecure households in which children, along with adults, were food insecure.
l 977 000 children lived in households in which one or more child experienced very low food security.
Interestingly, agriculture is a major industry in the US, with California accounting for over 12 percent of the US agriculture cash receipts.
On the international scene, the World Summit on Food Security held in Rome in 1996 produced two key documents, the Rome Declaration on World Food Security and the World Food Summit Plan of Action.
The Rome Declaration called for the members of the UN to work to halve the number of chronically undernourished people on earth by the year 2015.
The Plan of Action set a number of targets for governments and NGOs for achieving food security at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels.
A few days ago, Chatham House released a report, Choke points and Vulnerabilities in Global Food Trade, which said world food security was at risk.
Almost 25 percent of the world’s food is traded on international markets and is transported through routes such as the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal and the Turkish Straits.
These trade routes are known as choke points and the 14 key choke points are under threat due to climate change.
Chatham House has called for the protection of these key points as their infrastructure is old and would struggle to cope with natural disasters which are expected to grow in frequency as the planet warms up.
There are risks for both the food security of importing countries and the economies of those exporting food.
The most important inland and coastal choke points lie in the US, Brazil and the Black Sea, which account for 53 percent of global exports of wheat, rice, maize and soybean.
These choke points are exposed to three broad categories of disruptive hazards.
First, there are weather and climate hazards, including storms or floods that may temporarily close choke points, and weather-related wear and tear of infrastructure that reduces its efficiency and makes it more vulnerable to extreme events.
Second, security and conflict hazards may arise from war, political instability, piracy, organised crime and/or terrorism.
The third category of hazards is institutional, such as a decision by authorities to close a choke point or restrict the passage of food (for example, by imposing export controls).
Dependency on these main choke points is a threat to nations and growing international trade means that choke point dependency is likely to increase for the foreseeable future.
For example, this June, overland routes that carry 40 percent of Qatar’s food imports – including just under a fifth of its wheat imports – were closed as part of a blockade.
Climate change is expected to aggravate drivers of conflict and instability.
It will also lead to more frequent harvest failures, increasing the risk of governments imposing export controls.
Climate change may also increase the risk of concurrent supply disruptions.
It is also expected to exert a further drag on crop yields and become an increasingly destabilising influence on global harvests.
In all this, one should ask: What is, can, and will Zimbabwe do to meet these rising threats, taking into cognisance its relationship with the West, internal socio-economic factors and the political environment?