Lesotho’s Food Insecurity Disaster demands a Global Government Response

On the 24th of July 2024, Lesotho declared a food insecurity disaster, evidenced by 580,000 people recognised as food insecure out of a total population of 2 million (World Food Programme, 2024). From an economic standpoint, this can worsen health levels, harming the workforce’s productivity, and depressing incomes and economic growth. This is illustrated by almost half of Lesotho’s population living in poverty and 24.1% living in extreme poverty (World Food Programme, 2024). As a result, governments must tackle food insecurity in Lesotho to address rural poverty and broaden access to food.

One form of intervention is using subsidies in the agricultural market, targeted at small-scale farmers. This can lower production costs, incentivising increased food production due to the profit motive, and ensure allocative efficiency. These lower costs can be passed down onto consumers causing prices to fall, increasing affordability, and reducing the excludability of food from society. In terms of the demand side, Lesotho is regarded as an unequal country with a staggering urban-rural divide, conveyed by the 50.5 Gini coefficient measured in 2019. This means that access to food is concentrated among individuals living in urban areas, working in the private sector. However, the main limitation of this subsidy is that eventually, farmers may become overly reliant upon it, causing productive efficiency to fall due to waste of resources, limiting the effectiveness of tackling food insecurity. As a result, there must be an emphasis on a bottom-up approach to managing the allocation of the subsidy and with smaller farms fostering stronger relationships with larger agribusinesses to share expertise and skills. Agricultural grants are already proven to be effective in the UK with the SFI (Sustainable Farming Incentive) scheme which balances the need to protect the environment from climate change and to support food production. 81% of farmers positively judged the SFI offer (Cairns, 2024), demonstrating the potential to harness British farms. Despite this, subsidies result in monetary burdens for the government as well as posing opportunity costs in terms of other sectors. Consequently, to finance this, this piece suggests increasing windfall tax on oil and gas firms, due to their excessive carbon-emitting nature of operations. This tax can simultaneously disincentivise air-polluting firms as they face higher production costs, addressing the underlying causes of climate change by also hypothecating this into industries that produce environmentally friendly technology.

A second form of intervention is implementing buffer stock schemes to form secure reserves against supply-side shocks, such as the El-Nino-induced drought that affected Lesotho in 2024, resulting in 40-80% of the maize crop being destroyed in Southern Africa (World Vision, 2024). When harvests are insufficient, the supply of food contracts, bidding prices upwards. To maintain price stability, the Lesotho government can release products held in the reserves into the market. Government revenue can be utilised to further invest in climate-resilient agriculture and infrastructure. Infrastructure is necessary to facilitate the transportation of food from production areas to markets, meaning that food is accessible at a national scale. Overall, the scheme avoids food shortages by reducing reliance on unstable import chains and volatile commodity prices. A contemporary example of this is the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) implemented in the EU: between 2014 and 2020, Germany received €6.2 billion in funding, spent on both direct payments to farmers as well as rural development to promote sustainable farming (bundersregierung.de, 2020). A critique of this scheme is that the likelihood of government failure is high due to imperfect information meaning that the government is less able to set a correct price range leading to uncertainties over how much should be bought and sold. To counter this, governments should only use buffer stock schemes in the short term over temporary periods whilst using global trade policies eventually. For example, the UK-New Zealand trade agreement as of February 2022 ensures that traded food like beef and dairy products are of high quality and produced with “relatively low carbon intensity” meaning that both social and environmental objectives are being prioritised.

In conclusion, implementing policies such as subsidies, buffer stock schemes, and trade liberalisation requires both government and farmers’ behaviour to be influenced by strengthening accountability and transparency. Economic policy to curb food insecurity risk should be dictated by a mindset driven to preserve our environment and feed thousands. To broaden the outreach of these schemes, global cooperation is paramount in alleviating inequality of access to food. As a result, policies that directly influence the free market should be used in tandem with information provision campaigns to educate communities about nutrition and food waste reduction. There has been some recognition of this need as seen with the World Food Programme working in Lesotho since 1962 by providing food and cash assistance; strengthening warning systems to reduce vulnerability to droughts; and supporting resilience-building activities like land rehabilitation.