ABSTRACT
Food in Africa is probably one of the most serious and intractable human issues in the post-WWII era. In Africa today it is usually a mistake to think that rural households are engaged only, or even primarily, in subsistence farming. Observers both within and without the donor community question the efficacy of existing patterns of development assistance, which, two decades or more after their independence, seem to have contributed little to helping African nations deal with growing crises in food production and consumption. In Africa those who are landless or effectively so constitute surprisingly large and growing proportions of the population in many countries. Household- and village-level studies of food consumption and production in Africa show quite plainly that the “African food problem” is concentrated within several very specific segments of the population. Woman-headed households constitute a significant proportion of smallholder populations nearly everywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa.
