Water and Food in Africa: Problems or Potential?

A recent clip from Channel 4’s ‘ Unreported World: Africa’s Perfect Storm ’ surfaced on my Facebook news feed today and I felt I couldn’t let the tragedy go unreported on my own blog. The episode focused on the mudslide in Sierra Leone that destroyed the town of Regent on the outskirts of the capital, Freetown, on the 14th August. Despite being the deadliest natural disaster this year, with over 1000 deaths, the events were followed by a series of devastating storms in the Caribbean and North America and went largely unreported. Whilst not directly related to the food aspects of this blog, the tragic events bring the issues discussed last week sharply into focus. The mudslide was caused by torrential rainfall, in a country that is forced to import 90% of its food, largely due to a lack of water storage during the dry season. These stark figures highlight just how extreme inter-annual rainfall can be across Africa, with food insecurity perhaps not a result of annual water sh

There remains a common misconception, or what could even be labelled a blanket stereotype, within popular discourse that Africa is a dry and arid continent with a dramatic shortage of freshwater. You only have to stumble across a charity advert   on the evening television to see continuous portrayals as Africa and it’s people as teetering on the edge of devastating drought. Whilst the water-based problems seen in these representations are indeed very real across parts of the continent, with a staggering 300 of the 800 million people living in Africa in 2014 suffering from water scarcity , the problems go beyond that of a simple story of too little water.   The traditional metrics of water scarcity have been increasingly criticised in recent years due to their oversight of variations in rainfall and run-off patterns. Alongside this, they fail to take into account groundwater storage, which constitutes 51% of renewable freshwater resources in Africa, and green water, which is rel