Busoga Integrated Development and Care Foundation
Promoting sustainable healthcare & facilitating development
Food Security Support Project
HIV/AIDS is a huge health problem with profound social and economic implications, including its effect the ability of households to acquire enough nutritious food for members to lead active, health lives. HIV/AIDS has created or contributed to exorbitant health care costs, labour shortages, a declining asset base, breakdown of social bonds, downgraded crops, and loss of livestock. All of these effects contribute to food insecurity.
Households are said to be food-secure when the following four elements are in balance with each other: food availability, equal access to food, stability of food supplies, and quality of food. For rural households, the equitable availability of stable quantities of nutritious food depends on food production(using mainly family labour , land, and other resources); food purchase (using household income); assets that can be quickly turned into food or cash as necessary; and social claims on others through custom and societal structures such as family and community networks.
HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality has affected food security by reducing households’ ability to produce and buy food, by depleting assets, and forcing households to re-allocate labour from agriculture to patient care. AIDS mortality permanently removes adult labour from the household. This combination of adult morbidity and mortality and the associated reallocation and withdrawal of labour has led to a number of adverse changes.
Households affected by HIV/AIDS has replaced valuable and nutritious crops that are labour- intensive with root crops, which are fast-maturing but less profitable. Household members consume this mainly starchy food but cannot easily purchase nutritious food because of lower farm income. Chronic food insecurity and high levels of malnutrition among children, especially orphans, are the likely results of these changing crop patterns. Livestock may be sold to generate cash for patient care or as compensation for labour shortage, may be taken away from survivors, or may be slaughtered for consumption during funerals-or animals may die because of poor management. When households lose livestock, they also lose fertilizing manure, milk for the family, and “ambulatory” savings.
By killing young adults, the key earners of nonfarm income, HIV/AIDS dramatically reduces households’ earning power and, therefore, their ability to buy food and related goods and services. Illness and funerals force households to spend most of their cash on care, treatment and other expenses, with adverse consequences for food availability. Labour shortages force households to forgo cash crops in favor of fast-maturing food crops, curtailing the ability of afflicted households generate cash. Evidence from eastern and southern Africa shows that households affected by HIV/AIDS not only are eating fewer meals and consuming poorer foods, but also are investing less in the health of surviving members, losing even more labour to frequent morbidity.
Food security hinges on household assets, which create a buffer between poor production on the one hand and consumption and exchange needs on the other. In times of need, assets such as livestock, land, trees, and even furniture are being readily converted into cash to buy food. Households accumulate assets as an insurance strategy, but HIV/AIDS forces households to dispose of their assets. They are left not only impoverished, but also vulnerable in the long term.
Households headed by survivors-notably widows, orphans, and the elderly-are more highly dependent on outside sources of support, further compromising their access to food. Moreover, the centuries-old external support structures that guaranteed the interhousehold transfer of food to cushion the needy are collapsing because of HIV morbidity and mortality.
Our Key Interventions:
- Basic assistance of (food and agricultural support).
- Agricultural tools and equipment for vulnerable households.
- Shirt term school-based programs.
- Short term community food programs.
- Training.
- Counseling for caregivers of chronically ill household members about alternative food security practices.
- Training in appropriate nutrition for persons who are chronically ill.
- Training in less labour-intensive farming technologies.
- Training about the impact of HIV/AIDS for agricultural and veterinary sector actors.
- Community involvement.
- Awareness campaigns regarding food and water issues.
Office Address:
P.O.Box 90,
Iganga
Uganda
+256
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