Business as usual or transformative change? While the global agro-industrial food system is credited with increasing food production, availability and accessibility, it is also credited with giving birth to ‘new’ challenges such as malnutrition, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation. We reviewed the potential of underutilized indigenous and traditional crops to bring about a transformative change to South Africa’s food system. South Africa has a dichotomous food system, characterized by a distinct, dominant agro-industrial, and, alternative, informal food system. This dichotomous food system has inadvertently undermined the development of smallholder producers. While the dominant agro-industrial food system has led to improvements in food supply, it has also resulted in significant trade-offs with agro-biodiversity, dietary diversity, environmental sustainability, and socio-economic stability, especially amongst the rural poor. This challenges South Africa’s ability to deliver on sustainable and healthy food systems under environmental change. The review proposes a transdisciplinary approach to mainstreaming underutilized indigenous and traditional crops into the food system, which offers real opportunities for developing a sustainable and healthy food system, while, at the same time, achieving societal goals such as employment creation, wellbeing, and environmental sustainability. This process can be initiated by researchers translating existing evidence for informing policy-makers. Similarly, policy-makers need to acknowledge the divergence in the existing policies, and bring about policy convergence in pursuit of a food system which includes smallholder famers, and where underutilized indigenous and traditional crops are mainstreamed into the South African food system.
About 60% of southern Africa’s population lives in rural areas with limited access to basic services and amenities such as clean and safe water, affordable and clean energy, and balanced and nutritious diets. Resource scarcity has direct and indirect impacts on nutrition, human health, and well-being of mostly poor rural communities. Climate change impacts in the region are manifesting through low crop yields, upsurge of vector borne diseases (malaria and dengue fever), and water and food-borne diseases (cholera and diarrhoea). This study applied a water–energy–food (WEF) nexus analytical livelihoods model with complex systems understanding to assess rural livelihoods, health, and well-being in southern Africa, recommending tailor-made adaptation strategies for the region aimed at building resilient rural communities. The WEF nexus is a decision support tool that improves rural livelihoods through integrated resource distribution, planning, and management, and ensures inclusive socio-economic transformation and development, and addresses related sustainable development goals, particularly goals 2, 3, 6 and 7. The integrated WEF nexus index for the region was calculated at 0.145, which is marginally sustainable, and indicating the region’s exposure to vulnerabilities, and reveals a major reason why the region fails to meet its developmental targets. The integrated relationship among WEF resources in southern Africa shows an imbalance and uneven resource allocation, utilisation and distribution, which normally results from a ‘siloed’ approach in resource management. The WEF nexus provides better adaptation options, as it guides decision making processes by identifying priority areas needing intervention, enhancing synergies, and minimising trade-offs necessary for resilient rural communities. Our results identified (i) the trade-offs and unintended negative consequences for poor rural households’ livelihoods of current silo approaches, (ii) mechanisms for sustainably enhancing household water, energy and food security, whilst (iii) providing direction for achieving SDGs 2, 3, 6 and 7.
ISBN 978 1 86814 479 2All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express permission, in writing, of both the author and the publisher.Cover photograph by Donald Cook at stock.xchng Cover design, layout and design by Acumen Publishing Solutions, JohannesburgPrinted and bound by Creda Communications, Cape Town Foreword SOUTH AFRICA and its people are blessed with diverse and thriving wildlife. We are also a developing economy with a growing population. From these facts emerges the particular situation of having most of our protected areas surrounded by land that has been transformed, to a greater or lesser extent, by human development. Large mammals, such as elephants, no longer roam the entire landscape, and their populations are no longer completely governed by the laws of nature. Protecting elephants and the ecological systems in which they exist in a practical and sustainable way that balances the needs of humans, elephants and the environment is a challenge to which I am committed.This Assessment was undertaken to reduce the degree of scientific uncertainty associated with decisions that must be made very soon and in the medium-to-long term. It helps to evaluate the costs and benefits associated with each choice, both in economic and ecological terms, and clarifies the legal framework within which they must be made. Collectively the chapters in this report reveal the many successes our country's experts, in collaboration with their peers in neighbouring countries and abroad, have achieved in understanding elephants and their needs, in fields as diverse as veterinary science, ecology, animal behaviour, population and resource modelling.Importantly, the Assessment exposes important gaps in our understanding and thus outlines necessary future avenues of research. This Assessment represents a key milestone in an ongoing Elephant Research Programme.Science does not provide all the information required to resolve the difficult issues raised by the management of elephant in a changing and humandominated world. Many of the required decisions have a strong element of human values implicit in them. How do South Africans wish to treat the other species with which they share our land? Extensive consultation and careful consideration of the values expressed by a wide range of stakeholders is also an essential part of the process of managing elephant in a democratic country.I am grateful to the many experts and interested persons who invested their time, experience and intellect to deliver this Assessment. I look forward to their continued engagement on the issue of elephant management, which is of great interest to many. Marthinus van Schalkwyk Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, 2008 ContentS LiSt oF FigureS LiSt oF boxeS About the AuthorS And ContributorS Brandon Anthony is an assistant professor at the Department of EnvironmentalScienc...
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