Poverty and Aids in Africa

In this day in age, Africa is portrayed as a continent in crisis. In fact, during the last several years, most African countries have struggled from one crisis to another. The people of Africa face poverty, malnourishment and disease more then most people could imagine. Thus, the continents preoccupation with crises management has prevented it from serving as an engine of social and economic transformation.

Many researchers have examined the causes of poverty and underdevelopment in Africa. Among variables identified as obstacles to development in the continent are bureaucratic and political corruption, political violence, racial intolerance and destructive ethnic conflict, excessive population growth, non-viable economic infrastructures, poor natural resource bases, lack of both human and physical capital, protectionist trade policies, and several external constraints, including the economic policies of the developed countries. In recent years, however, it has become evident that institutions have an important impact on entrepreneurial activities and thus on the creation of wealth. In each society, the incentive system determines how market participants behave and consequently their ability and willingness to take part in wealth-creating activities. A country's laws and institutions determine the incentive system which citizens face. Consequently, one can argue that the several constraints to development in Africa named above are actually evidence of poorly designed, weak and inefficient institutional arrangements. Basically, the laws and institutions adopted by the African countries at independence encouraged opportunism and prevented the rapid economic growth that could have generated the wealth needed by the African countries to confront poverty and deprivation in their societies. In providing a few individuals and groups the structures to enrich themselves at the expense of the general population, the post-independence state also significantly increased inequality in the distribution of income and wealth, further exacerbating the conflict between ethnic and other social cleavages. There is now significant evidence to link economic progress to secure property rights, effective enforcement of contracts, and constitutional guarantee of economic freedoms.

Despite repeated warnings that AIDS could be a disaster for development, little systematic investigation has been done into the contribution of AIDS to development, and virtually no studies have been undertaken on HIV/AIDS, food security, famine, and nutrition. Demographic findings show that the secondary effect of a famine or epidemic could be at least as great as the primary effects. For example, a chain reaction of further famines and epidemics or massive out-migration might arise. The food crisis developing in southern Africa could be the first major manifestation of this chain reaction. Droughts and famines have afflicted large parts of Africa throughout history. In past decades, these food crises have had a characteristic demographic and socioeconomic profile. They have raised crude death rates by two to five fold, with mortality concentrated in very young and elderly people, and mortality in males has been higher than in females. However, farmers have developed sophisticated coping strategies that are characterized by considerable resilience--defined as the ability to return to a former livelihood on the basis of diversity of income and food sources--and accumulated skills, including knowledge of wild foods and kinship networks. Only when these coping strategies collapse are African societies faced with the inability to command sufficient food to prevent starvation and outright starvation. Most typically, such extreme crises have arisen in wartime, when armed forces have actively prevented civilian populations from pursuing coping strategies.

The present southern African food crisis confounds many expectations. A cycle of drought is taking place, in which region wide rainfall failures can be expected about once every decade. The last such drought happened in 1991-92. Despite the fact that the region was economically and politically less well prepared to withstand a food crisis than nowadays, famine was averted. The main reason for this was the effective coping mechanisms of the affected people. The present food crisis is more widespread and intractable than its predecessors, and has three distinct features. First, vulnerability is very widely spread, including areas that are not severely affected by drought. The numbers defined as in need by the United Nations are considerably higher than were anticipated after the poor 2001-02 rains. Second, household impoverishment has arisen more rapidly than in earlier droughts. Third, present estimates are that--despite the return of good rains in early 2003--a high level of vulnerability will continue.

The factor that could account for these features is HIV/AIDS.