SADC ministers said they will be ploughing greater resources into agriculture in order to produce more food for the region’s poor. Southern Africa has been hard hit by floods and drought, and the move indicates a growing recognition by leaders of the toll that climate change is exacting on the region’s most vulnerable peoples. But Simon Vilikazi, an EJN specialist on food security, wonders if it’s all air – and no force.

SADC ministers of agriculture promised quick action on the region’s food shortages after a three-day meeting in May 2009 to discuss strategies for combating the local food crisis.

According to Bizcommunity.com, South Africa’s new minister of agriculture, water and forestry, Tina Joemat-Petterson, said that the region “is not immune to the current global financial crisis” and that excessive rainfall in some regions, coupled with drought in others, had contributed to SADC’s food crisis and drop in agricultural production.

She said, “The impact and intensity of some of the floods and droughts, and water quality due to climate change can be addressed through integrated water resources management. In responding to this, resources have to be committed in research in crops that are resistant to drought and those that may have a short life cycle.

“It is therefore imperative to introduce early warning systems that will allow us to mitigate risk at an early stage.”

It is encouraging to hear our regional leadership addressing the crisis with such urgency. It is especially commendable that there is growing – and serious – recognition – of the impact of climate change, a critical theme which the Economic Justice Network has long emphasised.

This recent meeting proves that our governments see the severity of food shortages in the region, and that they are trying to find ways of rescuing the region’s poor people from hunger.

But it is sad that again our ministers did not include civil society in their deliberations on this pressing problem. Again they have failed to include the input of CSOs that assist poor people at grassroots level. Such neglect of the positive role that civil society can play is unacceptable.

After all, how can we trust our governments to deliver on their promises? It is not the first time that officials have met and come up with grand schemes for addressing regional challenges. They met in Dar-es-Salam in 2004 and produced the Declaration Plan of Action on Agriculture and Food Security, which until now has not been successfully implemented, leaving the region plagued with problems that had been targeted for resolution all those years ago. The region’s presidents and Ministers of Development met again in Mauritius in April 2008 to discuss poverty and economic development issues.

Sadly, very little action is seen in our communities. The civil society of the region should therefore not take our officials words as meaning a magical end to food shortages in the region. Instead, we need to pressurise them to involve us in finding sustainable solutions to our food security challenges.