Concluding remarks

For my final post, I would like to briefly revisit the progress of my blog series ‘Water and Food in Africa’ and reflect where appropriate. When I began blogging, my knowledge on the water and food nexus in Africa was extremely limited, bar a few preconceptions (mostly negative) from popular media. I wanted to approach blogging as an opportunity to chart and share my own learning experience with others in a similar position to me, allowing them to use my blog posts as a foundation to delve into further research based on their own interests.  

The main focal area of my blog has been agriculture because of its crucial role in ‘end[ing] hunger and ensur[ing] access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food for all [by 2030] (2.1)’ (UN 2015). I spent the first couple of blogs investigating some of the basics of water use and agriculture to give my blog some grounding. This was really useful as it highlighted the insecure and inefficient nature of food production in sub-Saharan Africa.

The first substantial topic that I covered in the blog was irrigation, proposing it as a solution to reduce vulnerability and improve efficiency within agriculture. I specifically wanted to understand if groundwater irrigation was the solution to bolster agriculture and improve food security in the region. Groundwater resources if managed sustainably have the potential to extend the land under irrigation from 2 million to 40 million hectares (Villhoth and Altchenko 2016) across the region. However groundwater irrigation does not come without its challenges both in regard to implementation and operation, it is also not appropriate across all areas in rural sub-Saharan Africa for an array of reasons including capital and geological constraints. While still investigating methods of improving agricultural production, I came across flood-based farming systems (FBFS) and thus dedicated a blog to its exploration. I analysed the value and incredible potential of these adaptive approaches through case-studies such as northern Ghana.

After investigating how to improve agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa, I decided to briefly research how other factors impact the water and food nexus as opposed to simply just physical resources. This research led to my blog post on colonial legacies in water politics, and how water permits are unintentionally criminalising millions of smallholders. This section of the series really broadened my mind about the water and food situation in sub-Saharan Africa, providing evidence that the water-food nexus is not only a matter of ‘reductionist’ physical resource availability.

The final topic covered by the blog series was virtual water - the amount of water embedded within commodities such as food. The first blog of the section introduced virtual water, evaluating its use as a concept and model. The second blog explicitly analysed virtual water trading in the context of sub-Saharan Africa concluding that with a lack of tangibility and having many drawbacks it is hard to see how in practice it could replace the role of agriculture in ensuring food security. The model of virtual water trade based on water solidarity however shows great promise for improving resilience to gaps in production and natural shocks if incorporated into policy, while still requiring domestic food production.

I believe that this blog series has helped break the negative stigma and discourse I entered the process with, instead providing a narrative that highlights the potential for agriculture to improve as well as the value of indigenous practices such as flood-based farming systems. I have really enjoyed this blogging process, especially the freedom to follow paths of my interest. Although I have by no means covered all bases of the water-food nexus in sub-Saharan Africa, I hope this blog has allowed you as readers to gain a more nuanced and balanced appreciation of the diverse context of water and food in sub-Saharan Africa.

Thanks again for reading!

Max