Water and Food in Africa

For the final blog post, I wanted to look back on all of the topics that have been touched upon in this blog series. I want to briefly discuss each topic and then talk about how they interconnect with each other. The first topic that I covered in the blog was irrigation. I specifically looked at ground water irrigation (GWI), discussing how it could be the perfect solution. GWI provides a more reliable integrated form of irrigation, however, due to the hidden nature of the resource it has to be managed efficiently. GWI can provide perfect solutions to everyone from large scale commercial farms to smallholder farmers, but it does not come without challenges.   Investigating the topic of groundwater irrigation further, a discussion into aquifers and one of the most threatening pressures to GWI was initiated. The third and fourth blog posts both covered some of the potential drawbacks of aquifers or groundwater in coastal regions. Saline intrusion can cause long t...

With the population of Africa over 1.2 billion and an increasing trend of democratisation, it is hard to understand how the factor that still most influences water rights in Africa is the legacies of colonial legislation. In this blog I will discuss how the political structures that determine water access and usage are promoting inequality for smallholder farmers. I will also take the topic of last week’s blog post and further discuss how the work of large NGOs and international aid is the modern-day equivalent of colonialism in Africa. A report conducted by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) discussed how the system of water permits that determines Africa’s access and distribution of water is causing small scale farmers to be marginalised. The system of water permits that exists in various nations such as South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya was introduced under colonial ruling. The permits require people who want to use large amounts of water to apply to the gove...

For the final three blog posts I will be focusing in on knowledge and power, a topic that is relevant in all of the blog posts that I have written. This week I will be taking a closer look into indigenous knowledge, and next week’s blog will focus on how power dynamics and relationships impact the key discourses and practices of agriculture in Africa. The final blog post will draw all of the topics that have been discussed together, but it will also provide a critical analysis of the representations that exist in our minds about Africa. As said above, this week I will be talking about indigenous knowledge and its impact on the use of food and water in Africa. Indigenous knowledge, or traditional knowledge, is the knowledge systems embedded in the cultural traditions of regional, indigenous, or local communities ( UNESCO, 2017 ). Indigenous people rely on this knowledge to make fundamental decisions on everyday life. Such indigenous knowledge is most powerful in r...