Land evictions impact food security and employment

Land displacement is going to drive the country into a food crisis. FILE PHOTO

What you need to know:

  • From across the country, thousands of families are being displaced and their livelihoods destroyed.
  • Although the Food and Agricultural Organisation has indicated that 89 per cent of the population is food secure, that might quickly change as yield and area under active production reduces.
  • The government needs to focus on helping smallholder families secure rights over land as lack of ownership remains one of the biggest weaknesses being exploiting to push people away.

The media is awash with stories of rampant land evictions almost every month. From across the country, thousands of families are being displaced and their livelihoods destroyed. Apart from fuelling conflict that eventually results into bloodshed, loss of lives and property; land displacement is going to drive the country into a food crisis. Although the Food and Agricultural Organisation has indicated that 89 per cent of the population is food secure, that might quickly change as yield and area under active production reduces.

The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor [CGAP]’s National household and segmentation survey 2016 shows that nearly 75 per cent of all the food we consume daily is produced by smallholder families – mostly cultivating under four acres of land and growing anywhere between one and four agriculture enterprises. By displacing these people, we are blocking thousands of metric tonnes in food production every year and with an increasing population, the country will start to struggle to feed its people. The unfortunate part is that those that evict these families from land are most times not putting it to any productive use. A few that eventually put it to use, export much of what is harvested to fetch better returns further depriving the country of food.

A combination of these two practices – displacement that permanently ends production and poor utilisation of land by those who take it over will have long-term ramification on food availability.
These displacements will not only impact food production, but also drive unemployment, especially for those directly involved in these value chains.
There is need to urgently pay attention to the land evictions by carefully examining the medium to long-term implications on food production and employment, especially given the high unemployment rates and a rapidly expanding population, which is projected to reach 130 million people by 2050.

The government needs to focus on helping smallholder families secure rights over land as lack of ownership remains one of the biggest weaknesses being exploiting to push people away.
Also, government needs to support these families to increase production and productivity. The extension services need revitalisation and perhaps government can leverage very successful models of NGOs that have shown great success by picking them up and scaling them.