Social and economic change and changing food security A qualitative analysis of household level dynamics in Shamva District, Zimbabwe

Abstract

This study is about the food security and agriculture production crisis that was experienced in Zimbabwe in the 2000s. It is an analysis of small farm households’ dynamics in the preceding periods, and an assessment of the social and economic changes that took place at the household level including their effects on production processes. Guided by the understanding that small farm households have been at the centre of the country’s agricultural growth and provided the bulk of grain to the GMB after independence, it adopted a qualitative ethnographic case study approach, geared at understanding dynamics at the household level over an extended period. The extended study drew extensively on life histories from 30 farming households from two different agricultural settings – a communal area and a resettlement zone established after 2000. Some of these were farming households that had been self-sufficient in food production and were key role players in the maize economy in the earlier years. It particularly asked a key question: ‘what had happened to these households for their production to decline in the 2000s?

In answering this question, the thesis initially provided a history of how rural households have engaged their agricultural production processes, practices and performance. While rural households differed in terms of their resource endowments, there had always been symbiotic relations that enabled these households to weather previous food shortages in the past. However, with the dawning of the 1990s, a chain of social changes gripped rural households. Former extended households disintegrated and lost power and influence. With the migration of other household members to set up their own independent homes in other communal areas or to pursue other livelihood strategies in either urban areas or in other countries, social networks were lost and these had been key components in rural production. These changes ruined previous reciprocal relations.

Economic aspects that denigrated rural households’ livelihoods were equally important. While former farming households could no longer produce a commendable marketable maize grain surplus from 1991, partly as a result of the social changes that they were undergoing, with the adoption and implementation of ESAP, migrant labour households also started failing to meet their food needs through purchases. This failure was manifested through the 1990s retrenchments, increased cost of living, retiring and growing unemployment. Poor households that had earlier on depended on local jobs provided to them by the richer households were also affected negatively by these changes in the country’s economy. The very people who used to avail to them piece-work jobs in the countryside suffered from losses in household income. This follows that they no longer had the capacity to hire labourers. These socio-economic changes had a damaging impact on households’ assets. This led to the attrition of households’ assets before the year 2000 and consequently, rural households were left food insecure. In that way, this thesis relates the Zimbabwean post-2000 food security crisis to these households’ socio-economic changes, contributing new evidence on the after 2000 agricultural and food production crisis in Zimbabwe.