Using Market Forces to Improve Urban Food Security
Imagine your favorite food — something you eat almost every day. Now imagine that food is often not available at the stores in your community. When it is available, its price is so high that you usually cannot afford to buy it. There is no alternative to this food, and your nutrition — and the nutrition of your family — suffers.
Sorghum is milled locally and distributed by small retail outlets in urban areas of Zimbabwe.
This is the predicament faced by a significant number of people living in urban areas of Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans' staple food is sadza, a thick porridge made from finely milled grain. White maize (corn) is the most common cereal used to make sadza. However, due to the recent decline in Zimbabwe's agricultural production and the soaring cost of transporting food across the country, maize meal often disappears quickly from store shelves or is too expensive for many families to purchase. The problem is especially acute in towns located far from the country's major agricultural production centers.
That's where CRS' Market Assistance Program comes in. It works closely with farmers, experienced millers and existing retail stores to offer Zimbabwe's urban poor consistent access to another cereal — sorghum. CRS subsidizes the retail price of the sorghum so that it is affordable for low-income households.
"Many vulnerable people purchase our sorghum as a low-cost alternative to maize meal," says Cephas Taruvinga, manager of CRS' Market Assistance Program. "However, sorghum is also establishing itself in households as a daily complement to maize. So, for example, a low-income family might use sorghum to make breakfast porridge, and then use the more expensive maize at lunch or dinner. In both cases, sorghum is playing an important role in stabilizing and securing people's access to cereal."
CRS piloted the Market Assistance Program from September 2003 to June 2004 in Zimbabwe's second-largest city, Bulawayo. The pilot project's success encouraged CRS and its partners in the Consortium for Southern African Food Emergency to expand the project to new urban areas — including Hwange, Victoria Falls and Mutare. CRS now works specifically in these three urban areas, all of which are located near the outer edges of Zimbabwe, where maize prices are often most expensive and maize supply the most unreliable. The sorghum is provided to CRS by the U. S. Agency for International Development.
One of the most significant impacts of the Market Assistance Program is that the households who buy sorghum have increased the number of meals they eat per day. Sibusiswe Tshuma, 31, is a mother of five children ages 7 to 15. Prior to the Market Assistance program, the family would consume just one meal a day. Now, using the sorghum she buys at her local store, Sibusiswe provides her family with three daily meals.
"It is so very important to have the sorghum available to us at a good price. For us, it has become so expensive to pay for schooling, clothes and other necessities," Sibusiswe says. "Basic supplies are hard to find and the extra meals each day are improving our health and energy for my children."
