ABSTRACT
1052Hunger and poverty persist in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Many affected communities could produce enough food for themselves, and even for sale, if they had the basics livestock and crops. In most of these communities, the presence of tsetse flies and the disease they vector, trypanosomosis, prevents optimal productive livestock-keeping and mixed farming, resulting in inadequate local food production. Since a vast majority of the rural communities depends on agriculture, the removal of a key development problem like tsetse and trypanosomosis (T and T) would permit increased local agricultural production, socio-economic and market development, and alleviate hunger and poverty. A sustained alleviation, if possible a complete lasting removal of the T and T problem, is therefore considered a prerequisite to rural self-sufficient agriculture, in which productive livestock can provide milk, meat, draught power to cultivate the land, and eventually generate higher income and market opportunities. Hence the removal of such a key problem would catalyse overall development in rural areas. However, the poverty and food security status of communities in Africa is rather heterogeneous, and reflects the impact of various constraining factors, including T and T, on the current agricultural production process and human well-being, as well as on the overall development potential. Correspondingly, the benefits to sustainable agriculture and rural development (SARD), resulting from an elimination of the T and T problem, will also vary from area to area. In view of the substantial funding required over the next decades to address this key problem, and the need for early “success stories” that show tangible benefits, it is important that the initial T and T control areas are carefully selected according to technical feasibility, and to the predicted potential of increasing agricultural productivity in the context of SARD. Trypanosomosis is a major, but technically solvable, development problem, and the effectiveness of the sterile insect technique (SIT), as a component of area-wide integrated pest management (AW-IPM) programmes, to create tsetse-free zones, has been demonstrated in Unguja Island, Zanzibar, and other locations. This chapter (1) outlines the causal relationship between the T and T problem and food insecurity, malnutrition, poverty, and related disease and development constraints, (2) describes the impact of the problem on African rural communities and the overall economy, and (3) indicates the benefits of a reduced T and T burden, or even of its zonal elimination from selected priority areas in support of sustainable rural development.
