Anticipating and responding to drought emergencies in southern Africa: lessons from the 2002-2003 experience

The paper suggests that nutritional monitoring needs to be complemented by information on the sustainability of household coping behaviour. Unfortunately, very little such information has become publicly available. Food prices and market impacts varied widely across the region. Malawi created a major problem of oversupply, whilst in Zambia the private sector imported substantial quantities of grain when needed. Mozambique provides evidence that private sector import can happen on a regular basis when government simply stays out of the import business.The paper argues that an efficient and effective response to future food crises requires that food aid agencies and practitioners realise that food aid is all too often the first choice in response rather than the last, that its targeting is often poor, that even food insecure households will often prefer cash resources to food, and that innovative approaches to promoting market response could reduce the need for food aid while not compromising the humanitarian response.A balanced approach also requires that market proponents and food aid sceptics realise that food aid and other transfers provided in a timely manner to the right people can, in addition to saving lives, widen the future scope for market response, not narrow it. Information needs to improve emergency response include:improved food balance sheetshousehold budget shares and variable levels of demand amongst different staplesimproved market price informationdata on the incidence of different household coping mechanismshousehold income shares and an assessment of the likely impact of the crisis on the level of income from each source.Needed operational improvements include:governments need much more actively to facilitate market response during crisestrade regulations in the region need to be simplified and harmonised, and governments and donors need to invest seriously in the professionalisation of their customs servicessimilar professionalisation needs to take place among the market information services in the region.Strategic Grain Reserves played no role in the response to the 2002/03 crisis. The paper suggests that government and donor time and money are likely to be better spent on continuing improvements to market information and early warning systems, on improved infrastructure for domestic food marketing, on more transparent policy towards external trade, and on market facilitating mechanisms that can be deployed when needed during crises.