Agriculture

The project examines how experiences of conflict, regional displacement and mobility, and the shift to an increasingly market-oriented and import-dependent economy have changed what people in South Sudan grow and eat. The research focuses on the country’s borderland spaces, or locations where South Sudan’s interaction with the regionalized market in grains and other foods is most evident, like food markets in Juba. Furthermore, the research looks at experiences with border-crossing and regional displacement and how these can be studied through changing food systems.

War, Migration and Work outlines how the changing economy has affected social relations in the Northern Bahr el-Ghazal borderlands, particularly between the old and the young, and men and women. The result is a fraying social system, where intra-family disputes, including violence, are on the rise, and the old order is being increasingly challenged and eroded. This report is also a discrete case study on how transnational mobility across borders, encouraged by the growth of paid work and cash-based market economies, is part of changing generational and gendered relationships.

Before independence in South Sudan, the Northern Bahr el-Ghazal borderlands had long been an economic frontier between northern and southern Sudan. The Second Sudanese Civil War—partly a continuation of the exploitation of this frontier—reshaped social relations and livelihoods rendering them more dependent on cash-based markets.
After the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and subsequent independence of South Sudan, those people the war had displaced northwards to Darfur and further afield to Khartoum, moved back to rebuild their lives. Post-war Northern Bahr el-Ghazal was not the same as before, however, with livelihoods more precarious and market dependent.
In spite of the changes war and displacement had wrought, male elders still expected to control the labour of young men to rebuild cattle herds lost in conflict. Continued military recruitment for the new wars in South Sudan took men away from home, leaving women without support, who were then forced to find ways to generate income for their families.
This precarious post-war cash-based market economy and the rise of paid work created alternatives to traditional male and female roles. The social perception of work—previously seen as a form of servitude—also changed, with paid work becoming more prestigious. As a result, young men were less willing to work for their male elders and
women realized the necessity of income generation made them less dependent on their husbands.
Though paid work offered partial escape from previous generational and gendered obligations, the new international frontier with Sudan became the last barrier of the old order for young men and women to overcome. Male officials controlling the border felt it their duty to prevent the South Sudanese labour force—seen as a collective national asset—leaving for better paid work in Sudan.
Market dependence in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal and the mobility of labour, including across the international boundary, has a distinct generational and gendered dimension. This is clearly articulated in the local discourse of the young and old, and men and women. It also demonstrates how the impact of war and displacement, in particular the transformation of livelihoods, has sharpened the developing recognition of economic and social rights.

The ability to predict and analyze famine has improved sharply in the past fifteen years. However, the political influences on data collection and analysis in famine and extreme food security emergencies continue to limit evidence-based prevention and response. In many emergencies, good quality data are not readily available, which makes it easy to undermine analysis processes and distort findings. In some cases, these processes are even shut down for political reasons. Sometimes governments or armed groups are the party influencing results for political ends. But it can also be agencies, donors, and even local leaders.

This study documents those political influences, synthesizing findings from six different country case studies (five of which have been considered at risk of famine in recent years) including in South Sudan, noting separate influences on data collection and on analysis processes and the way these play out. Famine analysis will never be free of political influences, but this study recommends good practice for better managing political influences.

FAO assesses that globally 45 countries, including 34 in Africa, are in need of external assistance for food. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly through the loss of income and jobs related to containment measures, have severely aggravated global food security conditions, as well as increasing the number of people in need of assistance. Conflicts and weather shocks remained critical factors affecting the current high levels of severe food insecurity.

This statistical report, contains a subset of FAO GIEWS Country Cereal Balance System (CCBS) data, presenting updated cereal supply and demand balances for all sub-Saharan African countries. It complements the information provided in the quarterly global report, Crop Prospects and Food Situation.

The trends reported in the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) show a growing food security crisis in South Sudan, with a high proportion of people sliding into crisis and emergency food insecurity level. The underlying fears concern an emerging acute lack of food in almost all parts of the country, with millions of people, many of them rural women and children, affected. At the peak of the lean season in August to September 2016, Northern Bahr el Ghazal had 72% of its population facing crisis and emergency[1] level. It should also be noted that Northern Bahr el Ghazal’s food security indicators continue to be alarming with 62% of the population being severely food insecure (phase 3,4,5) by the peak of the lean season (July)[2]. In January 2017, the Sudd Institute, with generous support from Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, explored the proximal risk factors undermining food security resilience and triggering or perpetuating emergency level vulnerabilities in the former states of Warrap and Northern Bahr el Ghazal. Examining 6 major assumptions using Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) tools to draw important information from rural households, the results are instructive and in direction of our expectation. They provide insights into appropriate response options for combating food security vulnerability in the region that is nearly sliding into famine. We outline the key results as follows.

With the global population approaching 8 billion, the role of agricultural value chains (VCs) is increasingly important in ensuring sustainable and equitable food production. However, in developing countries, market failures can prevent small farmers from fully participating in domestic and global value chains, and issues related to climate change create further challenges.
Moreover, greening policies and actions, as well as concerns regarding nutritional outcomes, add complexity to providing nutritious high-quality food to feed a growing population. In this context, it is critical to examine how markets can be shaped to be pro-poor and to reduce negative social and environmental externalities.
The current paper examines policies, institutional arrangements, and initiatives that target and affect different agricultural supply chain actors to improve environmental and social outcomes. Specifically, it reviews the non-economic consequences associated with the current operation and structure of global and domestic food value chains and identifies successful private and public strategies to shape food markets that foster
non-economic benefits (social and environmental).
The paper provides key lessons and discusses policy implications on how markets can generate balanced economic objectives that also achieve desired nutritional, social, and environmental outcomes. It also highlights areas of future research to further understand the linkages between market forces shaping food value chains (FVCs) and non-economic outcomes.

FAO assesses that globally 45 countries, 34 of which in Africa, continue to be in need of external assistance for food. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in terms of income losses, is an important driver of the levels of global food insecurity, exacerbating and intensifying already fragile conditions. Conflicts, weather events and pests remain critical factors underpinning the high levels of severe food insecurity.

This climate change profile is designed to help integrate climate actions into development activities. Since 1980, decreasing rainfall has been accompanied by rapid increases in temperature on the order of more than 1°C. This warming, which is two and a half times greater than the global warming, is making ‘normal’ years effectively drier. Rapid population growth and the expansion of farming and pastoralism under a more variable climate regime could dramatically increase the number of at-risk people in Sudan over the next 20 years. Climate change will aggravate South Sudan’s fragile situation and may contribute to existing tensions and conflict.

Across the African continent, 268 million people practice pastoralism, both as a way of life and a livelihood strategy, contributing between 10 to 44 percent of the GDP of African countries. In recent years, this adaptive animal production system has faced growing external threats due to issues such as climate change, political instability, agricultural expansion, and rural ban-ditry that have transformed the rangelands in which they operate. From Mali to South Sudan, governments, regional bodies, peacebuilders, development agencies, environmentalists, economists, and security forces are actively attempting to address the sources of violence and instability that affect both pastoral communities and the rural societies with whom they share resources and landscapes.

These interventions are often shaped by differing assumptions about the source and nature of these conflicts, despite the avail-ability of extensive research and analysis. Though the local dynamics of conflict vary across different contexts, a number of trends and debates appear throughout the literature on pastoralism and conflict. This review draws on several hundred sources to synthesize the major points of consensus and divergence in the existing literature and identify relevant research gaps. This anal-ysis presents data from across Sudano-Sahelian West and Central Africa, to link comparable findings that are often presented in isolation.

Although conflicts over land and water resources in the Sudano-Sahel have long been a political concern and were a major point of contention in the colonial and post-independence eras, they have gained prominence in recent years due to the ongoing spread of violence, instability, and displacement across the region. Latent tensions over resource access and control, which his-torically only occasionally led to violence, have now erupted in some cases into cycles of mass killings and reprisals. In Nigeria, escalating rural banditry and reprisal violence between farmers and pastoralists has left thousands dead and many more dis-placed. In central Mali, the escalation of these conflicts culminated in the massacre of 160 members of the Fulani ethno-linguis-tic and traditionally pastoralist group in Ogossagou in March of 2019, as well as ensuing reprisal violence. And, across Sudan, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic (CAR), conflicts relating to livestock migration and cattle theft have played a critical and destabilizing role in internal insurgencies and cross-border conflict. For these reasons and more, conflict dynamics relating to pastoralism and pastoral communities have become a shared policy priority throughout the region.