Without a doubt, agriculture - farming, forestry, fisheries, and livestock - remains essential to the economic development of the world, generating USD 3.4 trillion in 2018. While the number has decreased since 2000, in 2019, agriculture still employed 884 million people, comprising 27% of the global workforce.
Executive Summary
This employment number increased in Africa to approximately 225 million people, with high representation from female farmers (52.1% in Uganda). Though the COVID-19 pandemic further pushed millions of vulnerable households into poverty, the World Bank notes that “chronic and acute hunger were on the rise due to various factors including conflict, socio-economic conditions, natural hazards, climate change and pests.” Agricultural cooperatives can “play a crucial role in reducing poverty, improving food security and generating employment opportunities” and subsequently, lessen the impact of such global shocks.
If successful, cooperatives can offer its members a wide range of services, including access to markets, resources, technologies, credit, training and warehouses.6 The Global Livingston Institute (GLI) too has established an agricultural cooperative, in order to help small-scale farmers thrive in the conflict-ridden region of Lira, Uganda. Leveraging the team’s distinct knowledge and understanding of their customers and their problems, along with access to training, warehouses and markets, the GLI team has the potential to change the livelihood of thousands of farmers in Africa through this project.
Covid-19: Poverty and food insecurity around the globe
Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world. It not only impacted and transformed every aspect of our daily lives, but had a severe economic impact on local economies and communities as well. Based on the World Bank’s projection in the early summer of 2020, this global health crisis had the potential to push 71 million people (baseline scenario) into extreme poverty and food insecurity in 2020, increasing the rate from 8.23 percent in 2019 to 8.82 percent globally. It was further estimated that the new extreme poor will be concentrated in countries that were already experiencing high poverty rates like South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported that COVID-19 pandemic hit the Eastern African sub-region, which includes countries like Rwanda and Uganda, at a particularly difficult time, when a number of these countries were recovering from “the impacts of recent droughts and severe flooding and dealing with the worst desert locust invasion in 25 years” (figure 1). The disruption along the agrifood value chain was felt more heavily by the local communities, particularly those that relied on agriculture as their sole source of economic income and livelihood. Preventative countrywide lockdown measures that restricted movements (i.e., stay- at-home orders, cross-border travel ban, etc.) disrupted access to agricultural inputs like seeds and fertilizer, caused labor shortages, “especially for high-value crops and sharecropping farmers,” and resulted in delays in delivery services and post-harvest losses. This larger, nationwide disruption had a cascading effect and was negatively experienced at the household level (i.e., loss of job/income, reduced access to fresh and nutritious food, etc.) as well. The pandemic, coupled with other natural disasters, have exacerbated the need for food security all over the world and particularly in east Africa.
