Sub-Saharan Africa's unparalleled food crisis: a survey on root causes and unsuccessful interventions

Africa is confronting an unparalleled food crisis. Comprehending how food insecurity perpetuates in the midst of the twenty-first century is a major challenge of our time, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where the hardship has worsened. This aggravation is the result of multiple inter-linked causes including extreme poverty, fast population growth, inflation, ongoing conflicts, climate change, displacement, political instability, bad governance, poor nutrition, low diet diversification, food loss and waste, water availability, among other determinants. In this survey, we briefly seek to identify and shape appropriate issues and holistic policies to address food insecurity, through better education and micro-financing, cornerstones for a viable pathway to lift communities out of poverty. Consideration is given to the impact of vast linguistic differences in foundational education and the need to integrate over 3000 national languages into educational systems. Millions of African livelihoods depend on some traditional 115 specific crops ensuring biodiversity, offering potentially valuable solutions, and on formal or informal seed systems, while one single model cannot address all realities. The multifaceted footprint of globalization on the food system affected biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and the potential overreliance on fewer staple crops, with both positive and negative consequences affecting the small farmers. We address some continuous unsuccessful interventions such as imported seeds, foreign aid, poor governance, lack of effective transportation, and international programmes which for decades have failed to erase food insecurity. The nutrition career field in SSA is relatively new and still developing, now aiming at improving food production, access to healthy foods namely for recently born children and mothers, and the overall food system. Only through a strong commitment to good governance and reliable agrarian extension services, home-grown school-feeding programmes, and production at scale with adequate market, will the communities be able to achieve healthy, safe, sustainable diets, and food security. The aim of this survey was to emphasize the efforts made in SSA to address the multitude of determinants of food insecurity, hence supporting ideas to control poverty-induced hunger to acceptable figures.