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Poverty: The First Cause of Food Insecurity

The Sahel is one of the regions in the world most affected by the phenomenon of poverty: it is estimated that one Sahelian out of two lives with less than a dollar a day. The developments in the course of the last ten years show that the situation is deteriorating alarmingly: The GDP per capita has dropped by 30% putting it at 284 dollars presently. The few studies available show that the nutritional status of some categories of the population has degraded.
This fall in the resources available per capita results from the combination of rapid population growth (more than 3% per year, one of the highest rates in the world) and an economy that is running out of steam. If agricultural production has, on the whole, kept us with the pace of the population growth, this has been made possible basically through cultivation of new but infertile lands. To this not very intensive agricultural production should be added the fact that the food processing industries are not well developed. All in all, the value added produced by a person working in the sector remains insufficient. At the same time, the other sectors of the economy remain too fragile to stimulate the economy: the Sahelian countries export mainly primary commodities (cotton, lives stock, fish, phosphate, uranium, iron, etc.) on the regional and the world market. [...]
Beyond the scope of monetary poverty, structural food insecurity also results from the exclusion of certain categories of the population from access to resources such as education, information, credit, land etc. If food insecurity is more prevalent in the rural zones of the Sahel, it is because literacy rate of the rural people, their access to health services, their access to portable water supply... are below the level in the urban areas. Although the data relative to the availability of credit or land security are fragmented, it is self--evident that the difficulties met in accessing these productive factors combine with the climatic hazards in maintaining a large number of rural people in a state of poverty.

From Sahel 21: No to Poverty, Opting for Sustainable Food Security. (CILSS)