The HIV and Urban Food Security Nexus

This is part of a series of policy and research papers designed to raise the profile of the urban food security issue in Africa by presenting new research findings and policy recommendations.

While the AIDS epidemic is associated more with urban than rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, the opposite is true of food security.7 There is a pervasive, and misleading, idea that food insecurity is largely a rural problem affecting rural households.8 Considerable attention has been devoted to how the AIDS epidemic impacts on smallholder agricultural production and productivity.9 This has had two results, one positive, one negative. On the one hand, there is now a considerable body of knowledge on the negative impacts of the epidemic on agricultural production. On the other, our understanding of the link between HIV and urban food security is fragmentary and has to be pieced together from case study evidence.