‘People are Trying to be Modern’: Food Security Failures and the Strategies of Women Subsistence Farmers in Rural Zambia.

Terry Leahy and Debbie Jean Brown 2012

Introduction

In what remains a cogent critique, Ferguson (1990) arguesthat the discourse of development depends upon a particular characterisation of the problems of the less developed country. The root problem is always a supposed failure to integrate into the world commodity economy. This failure takes place in a rural area ‘untouched by development’(Ferguson 1990:27), beset by traditional economic notions. The solutions are always technical improvements that assist local rural people to enter the market. As he points out, this characterisation fails to acknowledge the extent of integration into the commodity economy that has already taken place, and depoliticizes the problem of poverty. The projects founded upon this understanding almost always fail. This analysis is still extremely pertinent today, in a range of Southern Africancountries such as South Africa and Uganda, to mention two(Leahy 2009; Leahy 2011; Alinyo and Leahy 2012; Bryceson 2000; Cousins 2007; Lahiff 2003; Walker 2007; Marais and Botes 2007; Mkize 2008). The present discussion concerns Zambia.

While Ferguson concentrates his critique on development projects initiated with assistance from the national governments of the first world, another strand of writingon development promotes alliances between local agents ofchange and non government agencies, funded by the sympathetic middle class of the rich countries (for

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example in work by Bunch 1997; Chambers 1995; Pretty 1999). Clearly, some of these NGOs work within the discourse of development that Ferguson critiques. Yet, there is an opening here for a more critical analysis of the causes of impoverishment than that promoted by government agencies. Unlike Ferguson (1990:281), writers in this school do think that they have useful advice for the poor on how to conduct their lives to achieve greaterwell being – though of course they also believe that a genuine participation by the poor is the only foundation for successful development interventions.

Much writing on food insecurity begins with the understandable assumption that food insecurity is a problem and proceeds to consider various strategies of aid, assistance or economic reform to solve the problem (for example Shiferaw et al. 2011; Bronkhorst 2011). A foundational premise of this approach is to view food insecurity as a problem which is visited upon the poor and requires a remedy from outside to fix. The researcherbecomes an assistant to the philanthropist. The agency ofthe poor is obscured. The following discussion attempts ashift of focus. What are the poor doing and thinking to contribute to food insecurity?

In making this analysis we are intending to use the concept of ‘fatal strategy’ as employed by Baudrillard insome of his work (1990; 1983). A fatal strategy is a formof resistance to power. The fatalistic and angry refusal to do anything about an impossible situation ends up by harming the oppressed themselves. A related response of the oppressed to power is to demonstrate their willingness to submit by excessive and arbitrary conformity – Baudrillard’s ‘hyperconformity’ (1983: 48)..

We will be arguing that the fatal strategy of the Zambianvillagers is to have created an ideal for food provisioning which is hyperconformist in its intention tolink food provision to moral performance. What is morallyappropriate is hard work in the cash economy and disciplined scientific practice in the subsistence economy. A result of this strategy in real life is to

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constantly run short of food, something which is in many ways predictable, but which is instead experienced as an unfortunate failure of reality to meet reasonable expectations. This ideal is to work in the cash economy to provide income, which can be used to bring about a subsistence farming economy that provides sufficient food. As a fatal strategy this ideal operates by creatinga retreat to the modal. The strategies employed by the poor to provision themselves with food ‘should’ work, if only the context was as it ‘should’ be.

This article is informed by Daniel Miller’s analysis of the meanings of material objects (2010). In modernist discourse we tend to conceive material objects as fittingvarious rational functions and consequently evaluate people’s use of objects according to this procrustean schema, yet in fact, ‘there never was a functional society’ (Miller 2010: 47). Miller’s analysis can be applied to the promotion of solutions to food insecurity in the developing world. Food is the paradigm case to evaluate consumption according to a rational functionalist model based in scientific notions of nutrition. Agricultural science also asks what techniquescan be most efficiently used to provide adequate nutritious food in a given climatic (and economic) context. Yet what this can overlook is the meanings whichpeople give to particular kinds of food and particular kinds of food provisioning. Suggesting a change in foods consumed or in methods of providing food is to hope for acultural change and premise the necessity of this change on a functionalist model of utility and efficiency. Yet this may have little to do with the people for whom food insecurity is a problem. By ignoring the social meanings that the poor give to their food strategies, philanthropists are condemned to endlessly repeat inadequate project designs.

Miller also draws on the work of Latour (1993). As Millerputs it ‘objects make us, as part of the very same process by which we make them’ (Miller 2010: 60). In thisdiscussion, the plants and animals that are the subject of agricultural strategies are causally central in what

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can and cannot be achieved. In particular maize, as a crop with certain requirements, and maize as a plant thatis being grown according to methods that have become culturally normative, is a central element in understanding the problems of food insecurity.

This study is based on research conducted in the villagesaround the town of Katete in the eastern plateau of Zambia. Both authors of this study conducted interviews with local people in December of 2010 and engaged in participant observation of village life and agricultural activities in the same period. One set of interviews was conducted in Tumba village (about 100 households) with a cohort of single woman heads of households who were all over 50 years of age. The other set of interviews was more various. Some interviews were conducted with villagers from Nyandane village (approximately 160 households) who were asked about their food situation andtheir agricultural work. Other interviews were conducted with workers from the Kai NGO development centre, which is about five kilometres from Katete and is funded by a variety of church and aid organizations from rich countries (30 full time employees). The town of Katete is located on the eastern plateau areaof Zambia. The local language is Chichewa. Around Katete,the land is mostly flat with low rolling hills. The rainall 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, a result of colonial decisions to enhance political control and to move the population out of land reserved for European occupation (Phiria et al. 2004; Vail 1977).

Food insecurity around Katete

The malnutrition of the rural Zambian population is well known. For example a Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection study in the first quarter of 2008 considered three rural communities in Zambia, finding that food consumption was ‘nearly half of daily calorific requirements on average’ (Barkworth and Harland 2008:6).

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This malnutrition is revealed by the stunting of Zambian children relative to age. In households in remote areas more than 6 km from a tarred road, one analysis found 63%of children were stunted. More generally, the stunting rate in under five children in Zambia is 45% (Barkworth and Harland 2008: 7,10).

There are overall shortages of food calories, protein, iron and vitamin A, to take the most salient issues. These shortages are partly due to diets constructed around white maize, very deficient in vitamin A and iron compared to more traditional African grains (Japan Association 2008: 39). Also the diet is poor in leafy vegetables, animal proteins and fats and oils (see below). People are growing insufficient maize to cover their own needs and a shortage of money is preventing them from buying enough to make up the difference. A sample survey found 35% of Zambian villages purchased maize to cover a deficit in their own production (Japan Association 2008: 22).

In our interviews, hunger was commonly identified to be one of the key problems facing the villages and even relatively wealthy villagers did not have adequate supplies of food. A typical statement for the older female villagers who were interviewed was that of Odra who said “My living … I find difficulties in my life, especially in finding food, so I do a lot of piecework”. When asked how many times she ate in a day, she made the comment, “Sometimes once, sometimes twice a day, sometimes none; even now there is no food in my house. Ihad nsima [a maize porridge] once yesterday.” She went onto say that on two or three days of the week she, her daughter and her grandchildren went without food. On somedays, she did not have the strength to work because she had gone without food for several days. Joshua had a highschool education and was regarded as relatively wealthy because he had worked in a desk job in the local hospital. He estimated that in his village of 160 households, the only people who were not suffering from hunger were those (40 households) who had converted to Islam in order to receive donations of fertilizer and

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maize. He claimed that even though his own family had 14 hectares of fields, they had not been able to produce enough maize, because he was feeding members of his extended family, orphans who had come to live with him after the death of their parents. In consequence he had harvested in March and April but had run out of stored maize by January.

Land shortage

The source of food insecurity in the villages around Katete in Zambia is a puzzle. In our interviews, few mentioned a shortage of land. When asked, they argued that this was not the problem. Even more, those we spoke to argued that land shortage could possibly be a problem in the immediate vicinity of the town of Katete but couldnot possibly be the cause of food insecurity in the more remote areas that we had not personally visited. Peter, the director of the Kai NGO development project argued against the suggestion that there was a land shortage.

Most people, farmers here, they have enough land. And you see [laughs] frankly speaking, even if a farmer, has two hectares, or ten hectares, when it is not managed properly, they cannot harvest enough. No. Let me tell you. They can produce a lot of food. Even on one hectare.

Michael, another organizer for the project confirmed thisperspective, claiming that further from the road all households had at least three hectares, so there was no scarcity of land.

Despite these statements to the contrary, it seems highlylikely that land shortage is is in fact contributing to food insecurity. The top quartile of smallholder farmers in Zambia have an average of 5.81 hectares in cropping land, the next quartile 2.75 hectares, the third quartile1.60 hectares and the lowest quartile 0.74 hectares. The average for all smallholders is 2.73 hectares (Jayne et al. 2006: 333; Milligan et al. 2011:361). On these figures, at least the bottom quarter and maybe up to a half of the rural population is struggling to provide

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sufficient carbohydrate production on the fields they have available to them.

Another way to approach this issue is to look at population density in Eastern Zambia. Currently, population density is at least 25 to 40 persons per square kilometre (Phiria et al. 2004: 133). In the early twentieth century William Allan, then the minister of agriculture, calculated the optimum carrying capacity of this region when it was being farmed using traditional methods of fallowing. He also included land used for woodgathering and grazing in his calculations. He estimated the ideal carrying capacity at approximately 10 persons per square kilometre (Vail, 1977: 149). Without the use of fertilisers or alternatively, sophisticated techniquesof organic agriculture, the optimum carrying capacity is probably still the same as in 1925, yet population density is up to four times that optimum.

The poor prospects for subsistence agriculture in EasternZambia are possibly no accident but a function of the demarcation of this region as ‘a native reserve and labour pool’ (Ferguson 1990: 62). The shortage of land drives men into employment while much land is kept aside for commercial farming. As Ferguson argues for Lesotho, these inadequate subsistence plots:

… tie the population of the labor reserve to the land, and keep the ‘redundant’ out of the cities. (1990: 236)

Land shortage as a delicate topic

Of course, land shortage is a delicate topic. Much land in the surrounding area is used to grow export crops of cotton, flowers, sugar and tobacco, so that these plantations, continuing on from the colonial period, can be conceived as taking land out of the hands of smallholders (Tschirley et al. 2004; Milligan et al. 2011). Or population growth could be seen as the problem,with African concepts of masculinity seen as the root cause (Jayne et al. 2006: 333). Then there is the role ofchiefs in allocating land and demanding payment for land

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from people who are moving into this area from outside. These land sales are creating a shortage of land for the original village families. Finally, there is the fact that a certain amount of land that is not being used for cropping is being used for grazing – often at least a half of village land. This could be interpreted to mean that a minority of cattle and goat owning households are creating a land shortage for other families. For example Joshua maintained that in his village of 160 households there were only six that owned cattle and ten households had goats, yet clearly at least a half of the village land was being used for grazing cattle. All in all, land ownership and the uses of community land are divisive topics.

Overall, cropping land is barely sufficient for most families and is only sufficient if they use fertiliser orintercrop with legumes and use mulch, contour bunds and conservation agriculture. On the other hand, in all villages there is land outside the cropping fields that could be used more effectively to produce food.

As a cash shortage

Given that interviewees tended not to see land shortage as the cause of food insufficiency, how did they explain it? The problem, they argued, was a shortage of cash to buy fertiliser for the maize crop. There was also a shortage of cash to take maize to the mill for grinding and a shortage of cash to buy hybrid seeds. These were the issues most often mentioned.

A typical discussion of these issues was conducted with Betty, who worked at the Kai NGO centre but still did nothave enough food for a large family of children and orphans. The translation was conducted by the clerk, Patience:

She’s saying she has the land but the soil is not fertile. Because she doesn’t manage to buy fertiliser to put in the field. So that she can grow a lot of maize. That is the problem that she faces. Like last year,

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she had two ox carts, that’s all. She harvested in March. And that lasted till September, then she had to buy some.

She went on to say that local maize stored better after cropping but hybrids gave a bigger crop. She planted a mixture, explaining that she could not afford more than one bag of hybrid seeds:

If she has money she can buy hybrid seeds and fertiliser, after the harvest she can buy chemicals to store the maize, but without money she can’t. She can only afford one bag.

Patience and Terry also interviewed Dora who was the headof a household with 12 members altogether, including a son and daughter who were grown up, an older granddaughter, also an adult, and a number of children. They went to look at her fields which were estimated to be three hectares in total – which fitted with the numberof bags of fertiliser she had been able to use in the past. She was receiving some support from a son living inthe same village, who was slightly better off and had managed to buy them hybrid seed in the previous year. Nevertheless they could not afford fertiliser. She contrasted her situation now with that in the past.

Patience: OK, she is saying, they were buying ten bags of fertiliser. She is saying they are failing now to buy fertiliser. Because their daughter was married to someone who was helping them. At least he was working now, and was helping them. But this time, he’s dead, there’s no-one to help them. He died.

Terry: So can you ask her, how many bags of maize were they able toharvest when they were using fertiliser?

Patience: They had a very big granary. Where they used to put their maize, but not in bags. It was very big, bigger than that one.

Patience pointed to the granary (nhkokwe) they are now using. We went up to it and Dora showed us the dimensionsof the one they had been using before, which must have been three times as big. Last year, they had filled theirsmall granary with one ox cart of maize which had been

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eaten by Occtober. Following that, they had survived by doing piece work to get cash to buy maize, but they were often hungry.

Yet these explanations are problematic. If it was true, as everyone says, that there is no land shortage, then why not just plant a larger area and get a smaller crop per hectare, but a larger absolute crop? A crop of one tonne per hectare is likely without fertiliser and closerto four tonnes with fertiliser (Japan Association, 2008: 10). So why not plant four hectares instead of one hectare?

Why anyone who is growing a subsistence crop as their main work activity would expect to have cash to pay for fertiliser is a mystery. Dora’s account of her situation is a clue to what is going on. She referred to two men whose work in the cash economy had provided sufficient income to help her to buy fertiliser and seeds. One was her daughter’s husband, who had now died from HIV/AIDS. The other was a son who had been employed at the local hospital and was now getting some casual employment firing bricks for sale. The ideal for food provision is to use various inputs from the cash economy brought in byemployed men. The methods of production are not premised upon a cycle of subsistence providing its own inputs but on subsistence agriculture making use of inputs bought from the cash economy.

The expectation of people in this rural area is that the household will achieve some kind of a cash income, from work done on the plots of richer villagers, from work on commercial plantations, by cutting wood and selling charcoal, by petty trading, by making bricks. Much of this work today is available only to men. Migrant labour in the copper mines of Zambia and Zimbabwe was the main source of cash income for households in the past, with between sixty and seventy percent of the able bodied malepopulation being absent at any one time (Vail 1977: 151).There has been a downturn in mining jobs throughout the South Eastern region of Africa since the 80s (Englund 2008: 39). New urban and rural jobs for men have not

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replaced this loss. Given a failure to obtain employment or a missing spouse due to death or divorce, households can easily fall into food shortage. Households most likely to be food insecure are those headed by women (Barkworth and Harland 2009: 4). The pattern of male cashwork and female subsistence work established in the past is central to the experience of food insecurity in the present.

From the mid 1970s, the Zambian government subsidized fertiliser and hybrid seeds to rural households, with an arrangement that for all practical purposes made these free items. They also controlled prices so that rural producers were guaranteed a good price for their crop, while urban consumers were able to purchase at an affordable price (Japan Association 2008: 18). With the impact of this fertiliser subsidy and price guarantee, the average yield per hectare doubled (from 1 to 2 tonnes) between the 1960s and the 1970s. Then, in the mideighties, the government cut out these subsidies and liberalized the producer prices for maize (Japan Association 2008:4). There was a slight restoration of the subsidy in 2006, but the prices are still too high for most households to afford.

This earlier subsidy and price control meant that a shareof the earnings from copper mining was paid to rural households via the mediation of government - rather than to men of those households as employees. This policy was no longer viable following a drastic fall in the international price of copper (Dorosh et al. 2009: 352; Tschirley et al. 2004: 18). So some copper wealth was re-allocated to the rich countries (as cheaper copper) and no longer available to the Zambian government for redistribution. After 1991, the real national budget size(money available to the government) declined by 50% and the share allocated to agriculture dropped from 26% to 9%by 1997 and 4.4% by 1999, staying at that level after this (Govereh et al. 2006: iv, 4). At least half the agriculture budget had been routinely used to subsidize fertilizer and fund the Food Reserve Agency – both measures designed to favour food production and alleviate

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rural poverty. The removal of these subsidies forced mostfarmers to stop using inorganic fertiliser on their maizefields and declining soil fertility was consequently judged by farmers to be one of their main problems (Phiria et al. 2004). The Zambian state is no longer taking any responsibility for even the minimal well beingof this section of the rural population. As Govereh et al. point out, key reasons are the ‘lack of voice of poorrural farmers and the rural poor in the political decision making process’ and the ‘low image of agriculture as a “backward sector”’ (2006: 6).

According to Del Ninno, Dorosh and Subbarao (2007: 421), the net supply per person of maize and cassava in Zambia has declined from 198 kgs per capita per year between 1980 and 1993 to 111 kgs per capita per year between 1994and 2003 (see also Japan Association, 2008: 4). The overall per capita calorie consumption fell from 2,250 calories per person per day in 1980 to a low of 1885 calories in 2001 (Del Ninno, Dorosh and Subbarao 2007: 416). Along with this, there has been a shrinking of the area of Zambia growing maize, from up to one million hectares in the 1970s to 0.5 million hectares since the 1990s and up to the present day (Japan Association, 2008:4).

So, at present, the methods of production for a subsistence crop of maize that are morally normative are premised on the provision of fertiliser to assist the crop. This fertiliser is meant to be paid for with cash obtained by work in the market economy. This is now very uncertain. Alternatively, it is expected that government will subsidize this purchase of fertiliser as part of their responsibility for the rural poor. This is no longer taking place.

What is food insecurity in these villages?

So far we have been talking about an absolute shortage ofcalories, coming largely from an insufficient quantity ofmaize being grown and an inability to purchase maize to make up the difference. But food insecurity is also an

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insufficiency of various nutrients which affects even thehouseholds that are regarded as well off. The most obvious missing nutrient is protein.

Supplies of dried fish and beans from the market provide protein for families that have cash. Betty indicated thatshe would buy some dried fish once a month, after she had been paid by the NGO – but otherwise her family couldnot afford them. Joshua explained his own household’s useof beans. He was asked if they grew any beans for drying:

Joshua. Yeah. Not really, we buy them from the market. They’re not very expensive.

Poorer households are unlikley to be able to afford beansand are not growing them as a regular daily addition to the diet.

While some peanuts are grown, there is not enough for a year round supply. Betty explained that her annual crop of peanuts would only last a month after harvest. Her explanation as to why she did not plant more was that shedid not have sufficient cash to buy the seeds. So she is not saving enough seeds for a full year’s supply to be grown and she is depending on the cash economy to buy theseeds she does use.

The amount of protein supplied from livestock owned by households is minimal. A chicken every three months is a typical diet of animal protein in most households. When interviewed, Dora did not have any chickens, though she had killed and eaten some chickens in the previous year. Pigs are generally raised to sell. She had three small piglets that were not yet ready for sale. A larger pig had been stolen by a gang of young men, who sold it to buy alcohol. Joshua’s household, despite his work at firing bricks was not much better off. He told us that hehad seven chickens in his house and rarely ate any eggs. They ate a chicken about once every few months. The common opinion was that there were only a few households (maybe 6 per cent) which owned cattle and a few more which owned goats. These are mostly sold in

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cases of extreme destitution and emergency or used for ceremonial occasions rather than being eaten by the family (see Ferguson 1990: 125).

This inadequate protein supply is supplemented by seasonal feasts of mice, scared out of burning brush after the harvest, and with termites and other insects gathered occasionally.

Then there is a shortage of vitamin A. This nutritional deficiency comes up in all studies of food consumption for African rural people today (for example Japan Association 2008: 39: Ekesa et al. 2009). It could be attributed to a lack of green vegetables in the diet. During the dry season, vegetables are unlikely to be cultivated in household gardens, because water would haveto be supplied by carrying buckets from a village pump, in the absence of any irrigation scheme supplied by a project. In the wet season, the cultivation of vegetablesis considered to depend on access to cash to buy seeds.

Terry: So tell me, what do you think is the reason why people don’t grow enough food in their gardens and fields?

Patience: OK, it needs money. Money can be a big problem. Because if they want to grow maybe some vegetables. They will need money to buy some seed. They’ll need money to buy, maybe some chemicals to spray. To their plants.

Terry: What vegetables? When you say vegetables, what vegetables do you mean?

Patience: There’s rape, cabbage, green peas, there are a lot. The vegetables that they grow.

These are all vegetables that are hard to grow without consistent rainfall or hand watering.

So it seems that most vegetables in the diet were purchased in the market and indeed interviewees mentionedthis option.

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Matiuda: I can’t manage buying meat because I don’t have any money, but I can buy vegetables for maybe 1,000 kwachas.

So a scarcity of vitamin A could come from a scarcity of cash to buy seeds to grow vegetables or to buy vegetablesin the market. Nevertheless, there were those who mentioned vegetables grown within the cropping field without irrigation (pumpkin and cow pea leaves) or gathered as weedy leafy vegetables growing wild (amaranth, spider flower). Vegetables were often cited asa relish to accompany nsima (maize porridge).

In view of all this, vitamin A shortages are a puzzle. One explanation is that insufficient vegetables are in fact eaten. Poor households do not take up the options tobuy seeds or vegetables. At the same time the weedy leafygreens favoured by earlier generations are regarded as old fashioned and not eaten as much as they could be (pumpkin leaves, cowpea leaves, amaranth, spider flower and others). This cultural shift is a phenomenon taking place over the whole of Southern and Eastern Africa (Ekesa et al. 2009). Another important factor is that there are few fats or oils in the diets being described here, an insufficiency of cooking oil, beans, nuts and animal fats. Without fats, vitamin A does not metabolize in the body.

How some of these insufficiencies cannot possibly be blamed on land shortage

Let us suggest that this widespread malnutrition cannot really be blamed on land shortage. A combination of dietary preference and agricultural methods makes these shortages of vitamins and protein likely. So let us talk about the kinds of agricultural strategies that could remedy these shortages, taking into account the land now available to the villagers of the Katete district.

Vitamin A intake depends on fats and oils being present in the diet. Yet various vegetable oils could be suppliedby planting crops in the villages, for example nuts, sunflower seeds, canola, olives. These sources of fats

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and oils could be intercropped with maize or located in the areas around houses and villages, or at the edges of grazing lands. Vitamin A intake also depends on leafy vegetables or yellow and orange vegetables and fruits being consumed. A realizable supply of vitamin A can be obtained from leafy vegetables growing wild or planted incropping fields. These leafy wild vegetables could be dried in shade to be served as a relish in winter to add vitamin A to meals. As well, fruit trees could be plantedaround settlements and protected from goats and cattle. Fruits such as apricots, pawpaws or mangoes could be dried or preserved during the growing season and consumedin the winter as a source of vitamin A.

You could make a similar argument for the shortage of animal protein. An excess of leafy fodder or fruit can feed some animals such as goats, rabbits and pigeons. Chickens can free range around settlements. Leafy fodder could certainly be produced in abundance in the villages around Katete which have much land that is now grazed by cattle or left as marshy bogs. An abundance of fruit, which could also be dried for later use, is also quite practicable on the land available to villages. Native figtrees could be a good start for chickens and pigeons.

These arguments apply even more strongly to the provisionof vegetable protein. Intercrops of soya, cow peas, peanuts, bambara nuts, and beans for drying seem like theideal solution to much of the protein problem. Nut trees grown in swampy areas and in areas now grazed by cattle could make a real difference.

There are solutions to the insufficiency of staple carbohydrate crops. Conservation agriculture (zero tillage) can improve productivity by using different planting strategies and small amounts of manure to replace the use of artificial fertilisers. Intercropping with legume vines, shrubs or trees, can introduce nitrogen and plant matter to produce yields equivalent tothose achieved with fertiliser – up to 4 tonnes per hectare (Phiria et al. 2004: 134). Other carbohydrate

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crops may be more reliable and productive than maize – cassava, sweet potato, rice, sorghum and millett.

So, what has been established so far is that current practices and expectations make food security unlikely. At the same time, there is a raft of technical solutions which would allow villagers to grow a nourishing diet on the land available to them (see also Leahy 2009; Alinyo and Leahy 2012). However clearly what we need to understand is why the current food system “makes sense” for those operating it.

The utopia of food provisioning

To fully understand the logic of the food system of thesevillages, we must consider the ideal of food provisioningwhich informs it.

This dream turns on casual work in the cash economy beinglinked to a subsistence farming economy that provides sufficient basic carbohydrate food. This cereal foundation is to be supplemented with treats of special foods from the market economy itself – dried fish, dried beans, European vegetables, animal protein.

For example Naomi talked about the way she would attempt to provide income through piece work:

If you are a woman you know what are the problems in the home. When you wake up you think, “What do my children need?” And so if Ihear there is piecework, somewhere I go and do it so I can get money,and so the time of planting I might hear someone needs help so I take my hoe and I go do it so that I might get some money. Or sometimes I find something that I can sell. Some women start a business.

Maize

This ideal for food provisioning starts with the preference for maize and the expectation that hard work will be rewarded with a good crop. In comparison to more

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drought tolerant staples, maize is regarded as real food. This has not always been the case, the huge expansion of maize into this part of Africa took place from the early twentieth century as maize displaced previous crops. While it was originally grown as a niche crop complementary to other sources of carbohydrate, it was the late twentieth century ‘shift of maize into a monocropped grain staple that changed its effects on dietand transformed African farming systems’ (McCann 2001: 256). Accompanying the shift to maize motivated by economic constraints and opportunities was a shift in dietary preference. Coral explained why gardens growing root crops were regarded as no substitute for maize:

Coral: Yes, it is true, but here, we prefer maize. We are not interested in eating food from cassava. But only maize.

Terry: What about sweet potato?

Coral: We prefer that when we just want to make tea and can make that sweet potato. You can drink tea with the sweet potato. When you cook and when you take that potato, you eat with the tea, or you can put it as a relish now. So that you can take food, and that potato you can eat. Just […] you can eat it with the tea. Just the same as if you were putting a chicken. We eat with the food. [note how nsima is being spoken of here as “thefood”].

Terry: So what you are saying is, nsima, maize, is the real food, [yes, yes]. That’s how it looks, and then sweet potato, cassava, bananas …

Coral: Banana it is a pleasure, just a pleasure. Not to eat it, like whenyou can eat food, nsima, no.

In this account, sweet potato is seen at best as a snack (with tea) or as a side dish (relish) to maize. We can note here that Coral uses the English word “food” to indicate maize porridge nsima. So, in terms of the FAO definition of food security (1996:4-7), sufficiency in maize is what makes for food security because maize is the preference of local people. Yet clearly this preference

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for maize in the villages of Katete district is actually a health problem. This is not on account of its nutritional deficiencies compared to other grains (in terms of protein and the lower B vitamins), but because of its high demands as a crop (McCann 2001). The preference for maize is hardly an aboriginal condition ofthe African peasantry and it is an aspect of the fatal strategy that we are presenting in this study.

Maize is a very high user of nutrients and depends on a good rainy season. Within Zambia, total maize production can drop to as little of a quarter of maximum production in a dry season and these bad seasons take place as oftenas every three to five years. By contrast, total production of cassava shows none of this seasonal variation and is increasing steadily year by year (Dorosh, Dradri, Haggblade 2004: 351). Scientific advice from the colonial period and up until about the last decade informed farmers that a good crop of maize is to be obtained by using fertilisers, by planting on linear mounds with defined spacings in neat rows and by constantly weeding. The fields are left open in the dry season after harvest for cattle grazing. Finally the fields are ‘cleaned’ by burning the crop towards the end of the dry season. This training goes right back to the introduction of maize along with wage labour in the copper mines in Zambia. (Japan Association, 2008: 8, 32, 34). It is so integrated into the culture that it is not at all easy to shift at this point in time. As the Japan association points out, the introduction of this sedentary agriculture into the African context has not been matched by a set of farming assets such as livestock(to provide manure), farm implements and fertilizer ‘resulting in an unsustainable cropping system with no means of maintaining and increasing the soil fertility ofpermanent fields’ (Japan Association, 2008: 32).

This method of cultivation and the cash income on which it depends (for hybrid seeds and fertiliser) are regardedas the proper and morally appropriate way to live. The emphasis on ‘cleaning’ by weeding and burning the crop residue is morally equated to other actions of cleaning,

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such as washing the hands before eating, or sweeping the yard to keep it free of weeds. The effect is to remove a large part of the organic matter, which otherwise could assist in maintaining soil fertility and to remove mulch which protects soil organisms from the heat of the sun. The constant weeding practiced in the early growth of thecrop has a similar impact. Current regimes of weeding also create immense amounts of agricultural work.

The sense that hard work in the fields is a part of a moral way to live was suggested by the interviews with single women in Tumba village. Naomi, when asked what would bring her joy said:

When I wake up fit to do any job it brings me joy because I can work and get food or money.

Grace saw her hard work as a moral duty to society at large:

In my life, everything is just OK because when I am working it is better for society. When I wake up, in the dry season, I start by sweeping the yard, and cleaning in the house. Then I cook porridge and after we eatI go and look for relish. But at this time, the wet season, I go straight tothe fields in the morning. In the wet season I don’t eat breakfast—I just go straight to the fields. Then from the fields, I come back and I cook porridge, then clean the plates, and then do the work at home.

All interviewees from Tumba described their daily routinein this way. Since the interviews were conducted at the beginning of the maize season, work in the fields consisted of preparing the ground, planting and weeding. This set of tasks seems to preclude in its intensity any other agricultural activities, such as building a kraal for chickens or pigeons, planting and harvesting fodder trees, spreading mulch on fields, growing a cover crop orplanting root vegetables. The method of maize production that has been implemented involves constant weeding and intensive field preparation that swallows time compared to the more recent methods suggested by zero tillage strategies.

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Now let us turn to the impact of this social constructionon food production. The fact is that this method of production systematically robs soils of humus. The artificial fertilisers acidify soils. The weeding and burning removes the beneficial impact of organic matter on soil humus. The invasion of cattle after every wet season packs the soil down and further destroys nutrients. The mounds on which maize seeds are planted are regularly washed away by the heavy rains of the onsetof the rainy season. Without fertiliser, the effect of these production methods is to reduce productivity constantly (Marenya and Barrett 2007: 516). The only thing that has held this system in place is the constant expansion of agriculture into lands that were previously wooded, making use of existing humus. This expansion has almost run its course in most areas of East and South Africa – there is nowhere else to go. The result is that over the last forty years, most countries of Southern Africa have increasingly become net importers of maize (Jayne, Zulu and Nijhoff, 2006). As is also starkly obvious, this system depends also upon the cash income which can pay for fertiliser. While the right and proper way to live is to have some employment and cash income, that is not always possible.

Vegetables

What has become more and more prevalent is the view that the appropriate vegetables to eat as a relish with maize are European vegetables. The use of local leafy and weedyvegetables such as black jack, amaranth, jute mallow, spider flower, cow pea and squash leaves, is regarded as backward, uneducated. Setting up the conditions to grow marketable European vegetables such as spinach, okra, tomatoes and cabbages throughout the year is almost always the solution suggested to nutritional problems by aid projects (for example see Englund 2008). Yet this solution depends on impossible inputs of cash, equipment and maintenance, in relation to the likely purchasing power and mechanical education of villagers. Growing vegetables like this requires a supply of water piped to

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the household or to a community garden. This is unlikely unless it is provided by an aid project, and even then itis unlikely to be maintained without ongoing support.

Coral explained the reasons why villagers may sell some of their maize crop at harvest time and cited the need tosupply cash to buy vegetables, among the reasons:

See, it depends what you wanted to sell. If you know that during the time you have a little of food. So sometimes you can not sell, you can just keep it. But the problem is, if you have got no money, where can you buy vegetables, tomatoes? But if you have a little of money so that you can buy vegetables, or tomatoes, salad, soap, salt.

Protein

In terms of animal protein, villagers aspire to own cattle, goats or pigs but it is only a small proportion of households that actually can afford this. Even in these wealthy families, they are raised for sale or to beslaughtered for a wedding or funeral. There is no expectation that meat will be eaten on a daily basis. When most of the interviewees do speak of eating meat, itis assumed that the meat they eat will be bought with themoney raised from their jobs or piece work.

Dora, who was typical of the poorer interviewees, explained that their maize crop was insufficient and thatshe relied upon piece work to provide cash to buy occasional supplies of meat:

She is saying, like in terms of hunger, it’s a big problem, because if you don’t have money, you cannot have food to eat. You cannot have anything to eat. So like, maybe you just buy a small tin of meat, then you need money to get the mealie meal [maize].

Joshua, who certainly had plenty of land to grow fodder and raise chickens, also explained that they rarely ate meat. Poverty was the reason given by his wife, Lily:

Terry: So do you buy meat, you have to buy it.

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Joshua: Yes, when we have got money we have to buy meat.

Terry: So how much meat are you eating, do you think? How many days in the week would you be eating meat, do you think?

Joshua: In a month, maybe once or twice. [Laughs]

Lily: Because of poverty.

One of the interviewees from Tumba village:

There are a lot of wishes; one is living in a good house, and enough money to buy meat.

As in all in all of South East Africa, the impact of the use of community grazing areas by a wealthy few in the villages is not contested by the majority of villagers; it is taken for granted. Mark, an aid worker from the local hospital explained the situation as he saw it:

Yes, because the only problem is, they keep a lot of cattle and that butthey don’t slaughter and sell, they just keep them, like pets. I told you the story about one guy who had hundreds of them, and he must be one of the richest men in Zambia, and he lives in just a squalid house and his family is in tatters.

The aspiration to become one of these cattle owners blocks any sense of resentment about this use of common lands. Ferguson’s analysis of the situation in the Lesotho highlands is relevant to this context (1990). Cattle are bought by men as they work in the mining industry and retained as a bank They are to be sold only to provide cash for emergency situations in retirement, asocial institution backed up by the ‘bovine mystique’ (Ferguson’s term) referred to by Mark. The result is thatgrazing land is not available to be used to provide villagers with daily supplies of animal protein – by growing fodder for goats and chickens. So, while from a rational productionist food security viewpoint, the monopolisation of a large part of village land by a smallnumber of households grazing cattle is a scandal, this isnot perceived as an issue by villagers themselves.

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The failure to integrate animal husbandry and protein consumption within subsistence agriculture is also reflected in the treatment of ‘indigenous’ chickens. While these are ubiquitous, little work is devoted to feeding them and they are not housed overnight in predator proof chicken kraals. They occupy the same conceptual space as the weedy vegetables that are still eaten – they are taken as backward. A ‘progressive’ villager would be expected to grow broilers (a different variety of poultry) for sale or produce eggs for sale using chickens kept in cages and fed on (bought) poultry mash. This would be the sort of entry to the cash economyand markets that development discourse might recommend torelieve traditional subsistence poverty (Leahy 2009). Butin the meantime, what is actually happening is that the opportunity to supply a substantial intake of protein with indigenous chickens is passed over. In the utopia offood provisioning, meat will be purchased. In the daily reality, meat is rarely eaten.

Fruit

Finally fruit. Wild fruit is becoming more and more scarce. Fruit is something that is to be eaten by children as they forage in the woodland around the village. Fruit trees are rarely planted. Fruit is not a high prestige food. Around Katete there were a great number of mango trees and the fruit was mainly eaten by children. What is never done is to systematically dry fruit to preserve it for vitamin A supplies during the dry season.

A summary of the utopia of food provisioning

Summing up, the ideal food production system combines four elements.

• Maize is grown with fertilisers and seeds, which are purchased with money earned in the cash economy. An adequate amount of land willalso allow a crop of peanuts.

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• The successful villager owns cattle and goatswhich are slaughtered for ceremonial occasions, or sold, if absolutely necessary, to generate cash in an emergency. Pigs and chickens may also be produced for sale.

• If households grow vegetables at all, the intention is to sell them. Such marketable vegetables require irrigation supplied by projects or governmental authority.

• Supplementary luxury foods are bought with a cash income – European vegetables, dried fish, beans and meat.

What is clear from this account is that food provisioningis constructed within a moral economy in which subsistence production takes a particular relationship tothe cash economy. Ideally, the cash economy supplies enough money to pay for inputs to produce a sufficient crop of maize as the almost exclusive source of carbohydrate. As well, there is enough money to pay for “proper” vegetables and for meat and beans. More than this, an ideal income is earned by men as the household providers, rather than by women through piece work.

The ideal and just making do

The reality is that this utopia of food is unrealizable for the vast majority of villagers. Hunger and malnutrition drive villagers to various systems of makingdo which are regarded as backward and primitive. For example, collecting wild weedy vegetables to eat as a relish; keeping free range indigenous chickens for eggs or the rare meal of meat; catching mice by lighting the brush in the dry season; eating termites (a children’s pastime); eating fruit from wild trees or trees that wereplanted decades ago (another activity of children).

Other elements of the utopia

Along with the ideal of food provisioning that we have described go two other aspects of the utopia of participation in the cash economy.

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The ambition is to move one’s children into a secure and modern existence. So school fees, uniforms and soap are all necessary expenses. Peter explained the way in which households would sell some of their crops to pay for thisexpense:

Terry: How much do they sell, what a quarter, an eighth?

Peter: Some of them, half of their harvest. Though they know that the rest of the harvest will not last long.

Terry: OK, so why do they do that, what’s your explanation of why they sell some?

Peter: They do that in order to raise money so that they pay school fees for their children, they buy other items for their families, yeah.

In up to about 20% of households, some of the maize crop is sold, even though the family is aware that the end result will be that they have to buy maize, and may not be able to do so, when their own stored crop runs out (Japan Association, 2008: 21). Coral explained how this could happen. Relatives would not loan a household money when they had just harvested a maize crop, because they could sell their maize, but later in the year when they were hungry, they might help them out to buy food. Of course there was also a good chance that relatives would not help later in the year (when maize prices would be higher) and that the family would go hungry. She claimed that very frequently the reason for selling some of the crop like this was to cover children’s school fees. The implication was that school fees for children were a higher priority than a sufficient supply of food. Villagers were prepared to risk their long term food supply later in the year to provide cash for an educationfor the children. Like other aspects of this ideal situation, the strategies adopted are premised on the ability of the cash economy to provide the money to make this strategy work – relatives will supply the cash laterwhen it is necessary. The strategy is premised on the

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ideal that children as adults will be educated sufficiently to take full time jobs in the cash economy and escape the poverty of their childhoods. Their food security now is sacrificed so that in the future they canbecome full participants in the cash economy.

Another requirement for cash is a ‘proper’ house, not onemade of mud with a thatched roof but a brick house with acorrugated iron roof. The most common response of women in Tumba village, when asked what would bring them joy was a proper house:

Matiuda: I have no house to live in, there is no food in the house, so it is hard to find fulfillment.

Debbi: Where do you sleep?

Matiuda: I am living in an thatched house but in my lifetime I would likemy own house with a metal roof.

In each of these aspects of the ideal, an assured relationship to the cash economy is seen as the avenue tomodernity, something which would be possible if the worldwas as it should be. As Joshua put it when he was explaining why people paid for their maize to be ground rather than doing it by hand, ‘it’s because of this modernization, people are trying to be modern’.

Gender and population pressure

The utopia of food provisioning has to be seen in the context of dominant concepts of gender and the family. The ideal is that men get a full time job in the cash economy and repatriate money to their family. A common account from the interviews is that poverty has come about through the absence of a male providing income through work.

Debbie: How do you have energy to work with so little food?

Grace: At this time I do not have energy to work in the fields, but in past years when my husband was alive he provided for us.

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Debbie: Does your son who lives with you help you in the fields?

Grace: Yes, my son helps in the fields. We both work in the fields every day. The other problem is that we do not have enough money for fertilizer.

The context makes it clear that the son’s labour in the fields is not what is missing from her life. It is a man providing necessary cash inputs for an appropriate life through his paid work. As we have explained, this is veryrarely possible.

Another factor related to gender is that men would also like to have more than one wife but since this is no longer acceptable, they are prone to leave households andchildren and take their economic support to their second wife. The combination of this with HIV/AIDS deaths of men(partly the result of men spending their cash income on alcohol and girlfriends) means that there are a number offemale headed households in villages and these experiencethe most extreme poverty. The intention of these single women is to do a combination of piecework (ganyu) to raisecash income and subsistence work to provide most food calories.

This gender ideal (men at paid work and women in the fields) means that fit adult men are not very available for agricultural work in many households, even when they are unemployed. The problems are exacerbated by the deaths and desertions of husbands.

The ideal is that men provide cash and women labour. Yet even when men are gaining income they may not spend it ontheir family. This is particularly common when men are involved in a small business of their own. Income gained from activities like making charcoal or firing bricks is regarded as the husband’s to dispose of, as a legitimate reward for hard work, and may be spent on beer or girlfriends. But a diversion of family income to the husbands’ own use can also happen when men take a portionof the maize crop and sell it (see also Ferguson, 1990;

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Barkworth and Harland, 2009; Alinyo and Leahy, 2012). Interviewees estimated that about twenty per cent of husbands waste the family’s money in these ways. Mark wasasked why these men did not just buy cheap maize beer to get drunk rather than spending their small resources of cash on manufactured beer in bottles:

It’s like everyone in the world. It’s a change. They’ve worked for something, and they’re drinking something that they can’t afford the rest of the year, so they feel like they’ve empowered themselves to do thisand they like it, you know. And next week, they’ll go back to the shubuku,or the illegal spirits, and the bangi (marijuana).

Related to this, a common event in the villages was for goats or pigs to be stolen by gangs of young men, who intended to sell them to pay for alcohol. Clearly, the utopia of family food provision is undermined in a numberof ways. A key point of failure is the inability of the current economy to provide men with migrant labour jobs in mining which would reliably fund both their own compensations for hard work and also pay for the costs ofthe household.

Another aspect of the utopia is the ideal of family size.It is hoped that you will have a large family. In the accounts of the older women of Tumba village, typical families of their grandparent’s generation had at least seven children, their own generation had maybe reduced down to an average of five and a figure like that was still common for young families. So while absolute land shortage may not be the central cause of food insecurity today, there is no doubt of it being a real possibility in the very near future.

Interstitial food provisioning with a different logic

The account so far has ignored some examples of practiceswhich escape the logic of this system of food provision.

Some farmers are trying out more effective ways of growing maize. Projects have convinced a number of

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‘leading farmers’ to plant out part of their holdings with legume intercrops for their maize crop – Mucuna pruriens, Faedherbia albida, Leucaena leucephala; Gliricidia sepium. Yet these are experimental plots and the technology is not spreading to poor villagers. For these rich villagers themselves, the experimental plots do not perform as well as the fertilized plots that they also run, and are more work. Other plots show the influence of ideas from conservation agriculture (zero tillage), coming from FAO, NGOs and the government of Zambia since 1999 (Tschirley, Zulu and Shaffer, 2004). About one in eight fields in the villages around Katete are using some version of this technique. In this method seeds are planted into small basins dug with hand tools –rather than the whole field being cultivated with a hoe and raked into parallel mounds. A mixture of soil with a cup of manure and a teaspoon of lime fills each planting basin. After harvest, crop residue is saved on the field as mulch. This is half way to a solution to the nutrient problem for maize. One problem is that most villagers do not have sufficient access to manure to make this technology work. Another problem is the impact of grazingherds coming onto the fields in the dry season.

There are also a rare few “nutrition gardens” in these villages. This system has been recommended by FAO advisors but has failed to catch on. A garden about a quarter hectare in size is situated in a damp area and surrounded by a live fence (meaning that no purchased materials have to be provided to construct fencing). Holes are dug to create ponds for watering the garden in the dry season. A variety of root crops such as cassava (a drought tolerant crop that can be stored in the groundfor up to three years and used as needed) and sweet potato (suitable for damper areas) are grown, with plantains, weedy vegetables, sugar cane and even some rice. The impact of this technique, were it to become generalized in the villages around Katete, would be massive. Our view is that this practice has not taken offbecause these carbohydrate sources are not regarded as real food in these villages; maize is the only real food.The other reason is that establishing these gardens is a

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long term project and involves a considerable amount of work.

A third interstitial practice is the establishment of women’s clubs to grow food to provide for families of orphans or people who are sick. These are present in manyof the villages in this area and constitute a basis for developing improved subsistence strategies for agriculture. However at the present time these clubs tendto grow maize in the usual way on their common land and often intend to sell it to make money to give the poor sothey can buy food, rather than developing effective year round subsistence strategies for provisioning the poor.

What is clear from this review of alternatives is that some very real examples of another kind of food provisionsystem are beginning to be established. These examples provide the resources in planting materials and knowledgefor a widespread change, if the social conditions conducive to this were present.

The perspective of the philanthropist and the perspective of an observer

So what to do? As noted above, it is not too difficult tothink of an agricultural system that could work to provide year round adequate nutrition and would not depend on inputs from the cash economy to any extent. Butthis makes particular kinds of assumptions about what is desirable (Leahy, 2009; Alinyo and Leahy 2012). It is certainly an example of the philanthropic mind set. The aim is to bring in outside help in the form of advice andsome funding, to kick start changes which would allow food security. The relevance of a subsistence strategy iscoming to be acknowledged to an increasing extent in the development research literature. For example De Janvry and Sadoulet (2011) note that smallholders in the countries they review are net buyers of cereals – for example 46% of smallholders in Zambia in 2007 were buyingmore maize than they sold, meaning that they were growingless than a full sufficiency of maize (2011: 475). Government programs which aim to alleviate food security

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by manipulating maize prices have been ineffective and they recommend programs aimed at increasing subsistence productivity – such as the subsidy on fertilizer which the Zambian government eliminated. Peeters and Maxwell make a similar analysis of the situation in Guinea, arguing that households that grow most of their own food are partially protected from a volatile food market so that ‘promoting household food production would assist inincreasing household resilience, particularly in the faceof the predicted sustained levels of higher prices’ (Peeters and Maxwell, 2011: 624).

But the biggest and most difficult change needed to achieve food security through subsistence production is achange in mind set. A change to food security through subsistence production depends on giving up the utopia ofappropriate food provision. In turn, this has very real implications for ideas about development – the story of development as a progressive realization of the lifestyles of the rich world. It depends on a partial negation of the dream of participation in the cash economy; upon a decision to provide food as though there could be no expectation of income from the cash economy. To advocate such a project of cultural change is to put oneself in the subject position of the agent of social intervention, a philanthropic project that comes from outside aiming to help.

By contrast, from the perspective of the observer, we cansee the present situation as an example of a ‘fatal strategy’ (Baudrillard 1990; 1983). It is a set of practices that add up to a mute protest against the stateof things as they are. Yet it is not aimed at ‘improving’this state of affairs by reformist political action and it in fact acts to make matters worse. The Zambian villagers express their anger at the state to which they have been reduced by constructing their lives around a set of practices, that would work, and should work, if the world was a fairer place. Work opportunities for local households would be available and there would be plenty of money to pay for fertiliser and hybrid seeds, husbands would remain loyal to their first wives and

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their children, hard work cleaning the fields would be rewarded with good crops, money would be available to buyextra luxury foods (that are also necessary for nutrition), government and foreign aid projects would provide irrigation pumps and dig wells to provide water for community gardens growing vegetables year round, and foreign aid projects would supply improved pit toilets while employing local people to construct them.

It makes sense to keep these two perspectives in balance.What we could say about the philanthropic perspective is that it cannot work without a sense, however implicit, ofthe reality of the fatal strategy we have described. It is that terrain which it has to work with. It is also necessary to recognize that the philanthropic option is just one of many that might end the current fatal strategy. For example, the failure of modernity to reach the Zambian villagers may grow over time to the point where they themselves take up other solutions to their life problems. The environmental problems of the modern world and the financial crisis of capitalism could get seriously worse. The oil price could climb to ten times present levels or repeated drought could make growing maize a stupid option in any year. Civil war and famine could reduce population to levels where it might be realistic for every household to own cattle and solve their protein problems through a round of ceremonial feasts throughout the year.

As Ferguson argues, we cannot see the current subsistencestrategy as some kind of original agriculture that needs to be replaced with modernity. Instead, it is part of a suite of strategies that make sense in their embedding within a modernized capitalist context. Here what we haveargued is that an ideal of food provisioning exists in these villages, which works as a fatal strategy, a mute resistance to the status quo and a demand for admission as full participants in the modernized cash economy. Thisstrategy orients current food provision around a set of expectations of ‘reasonable’ access to supplies bought with cash and to the employment options which will allow that. It also anticipates increasing entry into the

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modern economy with the expectation that children will become educated and get ‘real’ jobs in a modern industrial and affluent Zambia of the near future. The strategy emphasizes hard work and agricultural technologies that have been put in place in the past withthe endorsement of science and the authority of the dominant white elites. The implication is that this claimto moral virtue should be rewarded with effective access to food. In fact this is a fatal strategy and the result is hunger and malnutrition. Other options are possible given the land and resources actually available to villagers but they struggle to gain acceptance in relation to a dominant utopia of food provisioning. Within this total picture, maize as a crop plays a key role. Its virtues made it the crop of choice for local farmers and colonial administrators alike. Its requirements in terms of water and nutrients make it particularly unsuitable for villagers without access to the cash to purchase inputs, growing food in a region subject to constant droughts.

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