Migration, AIDS, and Urban Food Security in Southern and Eastern Africa: Case Studies in Namibia, South Africa, and Ethiopia

Introduction M igration, AIDS epidemics, and urban food security, interact in complex ways that are little researched and understood in the Southern and Eastern African context. To date, research on urban food security has been concerned with urban systems of acquisition and production, with an emphasis on the informal sector and more recently on urban agriculture. Much less attention has been paid to linkages and food chains between rural and urban areas and the degree to which they are embedded within systems of migration. Recent studies from Namibia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Kenya show that where urban and rural links are strong, it is the resources associated with these connections that dominate urban households’ coping strategies, rather than the intra-urban household relationships suggested by the current literature on urban livelihoods among the poor. While urban-to-rural remittances have been the predominant direction of commodity and cash transfers, benefiting the rural household economy, this dynamic is changing, with direct food transfers from rural households to urban households on the rise, as part of the migration process and urbanization process. However, while migration itself fuels the rapid spread of HIV in the region, the disease may be undermining this new social economy and urban food security through its impacts on rural production for the towns. In addition, AIDS may be diminishing the capacity of migrants to pursue other food security strategies in town, too, including urban agriculture. The virus’ long-wave epidemiology creates impacts in both the short and long terms, simultaneously changing the development context while creating intergenerational impacts that call for a “next generation” approach to the challenge of developing proactive, future-oriented policy and programming.