Posted on 02/08/2002 2:05:56 PM PST by AdrianZ
Africa's coming hunger
By Robert I. Rotberg
ZOMBA, MALAWI
Hunger is again stalking Southern Africa. Throughout the length of the already-impoverished nation of Malawi, there is no maize, the staple food. Cassava, a substitute stomach filler, is also hard to find. So are yams. Moreover, no one seems to be doing anything to avert the coming starvation. Officials deny the seriousness of the situation.
Here, on the rainy slopes of towering Mt. Zomba in Malawi, I purchased small white potatoes and could have bought dead and live animals that were dangled from outstretched arms, a scattering of vegetables, and a variety of herbs and charms. But nothing was on sale to fill the belly in the local African manner.
Neighboring Zambia is also bereft of maize and cassava. So is Zimbabwe, traditionally a much wealthier land that usually exports maize and whose people disdain cassava and yams. In Zimbabwe, too, cooking oil and sugar (both of which Zimbabwe usually provides in abundance) are hard to find. Bread was unavailable last week.
In these three countries, up to 30 million people are at risk of going hungry by July, and millions of children are certain to become even more malnourished than they already are.
The shortages have three causes: a severe drought in the 2001 growing season, heavy rains that destroyed crops, and official mismanagement and inattention. Despite independent warnings, governments in two countries, Malawi and Zambia, have been slow to accept the extent of the maize and cassava shortfalls. Both countries have also lacked the foreign exchange with which to purchase maize from South Africa or more distant exporters.
The growing hunger in Zimbabwe has more directly man-made causes. By attacking commercial farmers steadily since 2000, President Mugabe has destroyed agricultural productivity. In recent months, too, Mugabe's thugs have confiscated maize being stored on farms to feed loyal farm workers, adding to the spread of rural famine. Despite forecasted maize shortfalls, the government sold its existing inventory of maize to the Congo and Kenya in October. High-placed individuals profited.
In order to feed Zimbabwe from February to July, when this year's maize crop will have been harvested, transported, and milled, the country will have to import about 750,000 metric tons of maize. That means moving 150,000 tons a month along congested rail lines from South Africa, or receiving the equivalent in US surplus maize directly or from the UN World Food Program via Dar es Salaam in distant Tanzania.
All of this is tortuous, late, expensive (if purchased from South Africa), and politically volatile. Yet Zimbabwe, unlike Zambia and Malawi, is virtually bankrupt because of Mugabe's troops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and official corruption. Zambia and Malawi are poor and lack funds to invest in their people's welfare.
Indeed, Zambia's long-nationalized, mismanaged, and patronage-ridden copper industry, which provides 75 percent of the nation's export earnings, is about to collapse. By the end of 2002, Zambia may lose its main source of employment.
Malnutrition will hardly help the millions who are HIV-positive fight off AIDS. All three countries have adult HIV-positive rates approaching 30 percent. Malawi, with one physician per 60,000 persons, has the weakest health- care system, but the other two, especially cash-starved Zimbabwe, are also desperate.
Zambia has a new government, but the recent regime of President Frederick Chiluba was notoriously corrupt and magnificently neglectful of its people's welfare.
Once-tranquil Malawi has also been going through a crisis of governance and alleged corruption. Judges have been impeached, a tough and honest finance minister sacked, university students shot, and democracy made more precarious.
In a country where donors provide up to 15 percent of the annual gross domestic product, Denmark has recently withdrawn its mission in disgust, Britain is withholding balance of payments support, and the US has reduced aid.
Even if Mugabe is ousted in next month's election in Zimbabwe and President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia revamps his predecessor's policies, the specter of hunger will still hang over their two countries, and even more unfortunate and beleaguered Malawi. Massive outside humanitarian aid is required immediately. It should be coupled with outside insistence on governmental probity, but that may be asking a lot.
• Robert I. Rotberg directs Harvard's Program on Intrastate Conflict and is president of the World Peace Foundation.
Betcha this is another cause for the decline in food products. Many of the infected are probably farmers and other food workers.
If we let anyone in, they ought to be those farmers in Zimbabwe who are being driven off their land. Of course, those sorry souls are white so that's unlikely to happen.
The sad truth is Africa's problems are largely man-made and the men who made them have largely been Africans.
Why do anything to solve the problem if, 6 months from now, you can have the United States sending food courtesy of the taxpayers to feed the Southern Africa? There will be no shortage of aid organization, and 'artists and entertainers' will be putting up benefit concerts to raise money.
And the politicians will be buying votes from their farmer constituents by spending taxpayer dollars to buy food for the Southern Africans.
Move along. Nothing here to see. Its all been predetermined.
Better duck and cover. I agree with you, by the way. If successful societies tend to drop their birthrates, and you help backwards ones artificially survive, you increase their relative population and jealousy. The problem doesn't have to be international. There's a domestic conflict between discouraging birth control and cutting off support for the resulting unwanted offspring that is rarely discussed in a civil manner.
As far as I know we've long since stopped sending food to Africa. It did absolutely no good and in some cases made things worse. If the food wasn't rotting on the docks due to a complete inability to transport it, it was being confiscated by the local warlord du jour and used as a bargaining chip to tighten his control.
I agree with you. I just can't get worked up over abortions being performed in some third-world rat hole where life has little value in the first place.
There's plenty of other programs we can withhold funds to the UN for. Abortion-providing family planning organizations are pretty far down the list as far as I'm concerned.
Asbestos underwear has been donned!
My apologies. You are correct. I should have read your post more clearly.
The reason third-world women have lots of children is to ensure that there is someone to take care of them in later years.
Not just Africans mind you, but people from Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Haiti, Hmong, Russians, Czechs, Slavs and other people have been relocated to America. I want to know why? What was it that their country couldn't or wouldn't take care of their own? Why? I'll tell you why. All of those countries mentioned have a screwed up government, full of greedy bureaucrats who steal everything from their people, and oppress them to the point where death would be better. The reason why these countries are so poor, is because NONE of them have any idea what it is to be a society of productive people, who produce rather than be dependent on some central authority that governs them.
Here's something to contemplate. Sending these people aid is ridiculous, and the only aid we should be sending them are cases of a new product called Sterility-in-a-box. Better yet, why not annihilate there warlord governments, set up shop in each one of these countries, essentially colonizing them, and then ruling them in a way that they can have a culture, and a society of productive citizens.
The only way to solve all of the problems of Africa, and Asia, is for Europeans to land on their shores, wipe out the indigenous inhabitants, move what survivors are left on to reservations, and then set up a republic. It happened here in America, maybe it ought to happen other places. Everyone wants what America has, let them earn it by going through the same things our country did to get to it's place in the world.
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