Food Security Research Project Hiv/aids and Agrarian Livelihoods in Zambia: a Test of the New Variant Famine Hypothesis

We wish to acknowledge the financial and substantive support provided by the Swedish International Development Agency, the American people, via the Food Security III Cooperative Agreement (GDG-A-00-02-00021-00) between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Agricultural Economics at Michigan State University, and from the USAID mission in Zambia. Research support from the Global Bureau, Office of Agriculture and Food Security, and the Africa Bureau, Office of Sustainable Development at USAID/Washington also made it possible for MSU researchers to contribute to this work. Since the southern African food crisis of 2001/02, the 'new-variant famine' (NVF) hypothesis first proposed by de Waal and Whiteside (2003) has become an important part of the conventional wisdom surrounding the relationship between HIV/AIDS and food crises in the region. The NVF hypothesis suggests that HIV/AIDS is eroding agrarian livelihoods and exacerbating the effects of drought and other shocks on agrarian communities. These concepts have begun to shape the HIV/AIDS mitigation and food security policies and programs of governments and development agencies. To date, however, there is a dearth of empirical evidence to support the NVF hypothesis, and there have been no studies specifically designed to tests its predictions. This study represents a first step towards testing the predictions of NVF. We estimate the impact of AIDS-related morbidity and mortality on indicators of agrarian livelihoods in Zambia. We focus specifically on the impact of HIV/AIDS on district-level crop output, output/ha, and area cultivated (henceforth referred to as 'agrarian livelihood indicators' or 'agricultural production indicators'). The study is based on econometric analysis of district-level panel data derived from nationally representative household surveys from 1991 to 2003. The analysis is designed to (1) understand the potential lagged effect of AIDS morbidity and mortality on current and future agrarian livelihood indicators; (2) measure the extent to which HIV/AIDS may exacerbate the impact of other factors affecting agricultural production, such as macroeconomic structural adjustment, drought, and agricultural sector policy changes; and (3) determine whether these trends and impacts are consistent with the predictions of the NVF hypothesis. The study aims to strengthen the empirical foundation of food security policies and programs responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis in southern Africa. The analysis generates a number of findings that may help evaluate the validity of the NVF hypothesis as an analytical framework in the context of agrarian livelihoods and food security in Zambia. First, HIV prevalence rates and …