Africa's coming hunger

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.

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***

The dirty little secret is this - the women, often, are not the ones making the "choice" - in China, the UN goes right along with forced and unwanted abortions right up to the killing of 9 mo old induced newborns.

Margaret Sanger's agenda was very driven by eugenics - the same thing that drove the Final Solution. Cleansing the world of the "more undesirable" races, you know - always determined by those of the "more desirable" races.

Same agenda drives the eco-fascists, who seek to cleanse "Mother Earth" from all those dirty humans - except of them, the enlightened ones, of course.

Tribal mindsets / warfare***

This is very true. When in Kenya (Oct. 2000) every single person we talked with (many educated folk) considered themselves tribally first, nationally (as Kenyans) second or not at all.

Also, those who weren't Christian (I'll say Jewish, too, since the same set of ethics/rules guide both) seemed to take a positive view of graft since it was one tribe sticking it to the other.

Positive note, Christianity (and persecution, on the downside) is booming in Africa. The Episcopal bishops in Africa are giving the American church the heebie-jeebies with their insistance on strict Biblical interpretation. Gotta love it!

This article, as it pertains to Zimbabwe looks very like a report about conditions in the old USSR when the government was starving the peasantry in order to "build socialism" in the cities. There is NO benefit in sending food because it will all go to the troops and the rulers. NONE will go to the peasants. Small groups of peasants will be allowed to hold MREs for a few minutes while the UN photographers take their pictures then they will be taken for the army.

If you knew any history, actual facts, and were able to write a cogent reply, you might be worth refuting.

Suffice it to say , you need to more than treble that " century " number , trible warfare, slavery ( blacks owning black , without the help of Arabs or European whites ! ), and a lot of unhappiness abounded. There's your refutation. Now, go do some research, before you babble on about that which you know nothing about.

Oh gee ... sure, send ( for NOTHING, I asume you mean ) enough maize, to Zimbabwe, so that a crazed dictator, who is RESPONSIBLE for having vast numbers of white farmers and their BLACK farmhands, murdered, tortured, and / or intimidated and run off farms, which not only fed the nation, but was also sold abroad, and raised HARD cash, so that he can sell it to ther countries / feed ONLY thse who support him. Yep, REALLY great idea ... NOT !

Why don't we just send Mugabe sacks of US greenbacks, and heavy arms, so that he can be better able to kill off even MORE of his political opponenets ? Better still, why don't WE just send in some Daisycutter carrying planes, to drop on thse he and his things are rounding up ? that sure would save him time and money.

If knowledge was food, you'd have starved to death , a very long time ago.

Please state your credentials and your sources for yor positions, on the current state of affairs / living conditions / etc. of South Africa. Then, I would like for you to expalin why many blacks are so fed up with their now LOWER living conditions, job availability , and lack of freedoms, that a few months ago, a prominant BLACK run newspaper ( even with the governent cenorship ! ) banner headlined an article, on the front page : " BRING BACK APARTHEID " !

You have NO idea what is going on over there. Yet, you choose to lecture this forum on the topic. Blacks are murdering, torturing, and starving BLACKS ; NO whites are doing that. This has been going on for many decades, but to YOU , it is the whiteman's fault ? This has absoltely NOTHING to do with whites, colonization, nor anything else that you are throwing out there.

The USA has NEVER sent " AID " to South Africa ! What it DID do, is to stick its nose into te business , of a SOVERIEGN country, boycott it, and help to install a corrupt, inept, Socialist / tribal government, run by thugs, who turned a properous, PRO-AMERICA , jewel of a country, into a downward spiralling, third world , ANTI-AMERICA , mess.

If YOU are an American, than those descendants of the Dutch / German / French immigrants, now known as the Boers / Afrikaners, whose families have been born and raised in what is now South Africa, for almost THREEE AND ONE HALF CENTURIES , are AFRICANS ! I guess that you don't know, that the Afrikaners were in South Africa, BEFORE Mandela's tribe, the Xhosa were. Now, you tell me, WHO SHOULD LEAVE ? Don't look at skin color; look at who has lived there the longest.

It's the same thing as Jesse's " reparation's " con-job. Why shosuld a black, who has emmigrated to the USA, 10 years ago, from Nigeria, get " slave reparations " from the USA ( our tax money ! ) government, for the " sins of slavery " in pre-1865 USA ?

Let the woman be fertile. Fertile females and high birthrates are nature's way of dealing with high mortality....... The way to fix is the problem is by letting them be. The problem will fix itself to something sustainable, instead of importing food into the area, let the population go down to where the land that the population is living on can sustain it.

On a purely pragmatic level, what you say is true. Biologists can point out to countless studies on carrying capacities of an ecosystem.

However, should we treat other humans as we would a deer herd in an area with too few predators?

I am not the most religious guy in the world and am more agnostic than not. However, if there is a God and there is a Golden Rule, do we not have a moral obligation, not to feed an unsustainable population, but to encourage responsible birth rates?

Don't be stupid. If I made a statement that "The ocean is blue today."

It's a true statement.

It was blue today.

I do not have to recite a history of past days on which it was not blue, or when it was partially blue, nor do I have to define the percentage of blue vs. green, nor the composition of the water. Nor do I have to recite the quantity oil deposited in the water by American capitalism verses the quantity of natural pitch seeping out of Atlantic trenches. The ocean was blue today.

Since I made a reference ONLY to one contributor of Africa's problems, and for that I got a snotty remark from you over what I did NOT voice an opinion on at all...I ask you again:

Which part of my statement was NOT correct?

Well, considering the Chinese government's policies with respect to its own population, I haven't the slightest doubt that the natives will be "phased out" through mandatory sterilisation and forced attrition. Anyone who looks at the current situation in Africa from a completely materialistic viewpoint, unhindered by political correctness, will probably conclude that the current available workforce is violent, unstable, and unproductive. The Chinese can be brutally practical when it comes to "reduction in force."

Interestingly enough, if the U.S continues on its current immigration policy, it is also likely that the Chinese will be quite generous in allowing the natives to emigrate to the good old US of A, thus further inflating our workforce with hundreds of thousand (millions?) of even less qualified people. What better way to destroy a trading rival than by ruining his workforce? And it goes without saying that these new asylum seekers would massively inflate our welfare rolls.

So, if the West does not solve Africa's problems now, a Chinese move into the area would make the West's problems exponentially worse.

This entire thread proves that 99% of posters here are nothing but minority hating Nazi racists. The white man destroyed Africa and keeps ruining it everyday. And when the blacks suffer, you all just shout, "Die, blackman, die!". The USA should immediately cut it's military budget in 1/2 and spend all that money on Africa!!!! Just kidding. But don't de-humanize the innocent victims. You cannot say let them die and then go ask God for forgiveness tomorrow.

What a conveniently sterilized view of latter 20th Century history you have.

And please tell me what 'my view' of latter 20th century history is?

The fact is, you have no idea what 'my view of the latter 20th century' is, because you read ONE statement, which was 100% factual, and which you have yet to refute. You know absolutely NOTHING about my views, nor could you know, based on ONE comment. Using your own 'logic,' I could say YOU have a sterilized view of history, since you failed to mention the role of colonialism, the role of unionism, the role of religion including animism and islam, catholicism and protestantism, tribalism and the price of tea in China. Fortunately for YOU, I don't need to read things INTO what other people say.

If you believe marxism played no role in destabilizing many African nations, then you might have a gripe with me. If you know that it did, then you have NO gripe with me.

If you wanted to ADD commentary and historical points to the thread, then do so, without the arrogant and consescending remarks. But don't manufacture arguments with me, don't TWIST what I say, and when you don't know jack about my opinions or my education, don't EVER pretend you do and try to lecture me.

Allow me to rescue you from "De Nile".

OK, genius. What exactly did I deny? Did I say marxism was the ONLY factor in African history? No. You ASSUMED that was what I said, because your head is so far up your own butt that the only thing you're able to read is what is laying in the dust at the bottom of your own brain pan. You don't read what people say as-is, you imagine people imply things they did not, and subscribe opinion to them they have neither voiced nor implied. You took my comment, created a straw dog based on it, and are now trying to argue with me based on YOUR straw dog, instead of what I DID say. The fact remains that you know absolutely nothing about my opinion on the subject at hand.

And what white Marxists have made it. The former USSR and Cuba's support of Marxist warlords in Africa played a huge role in keeping many African nations destablized.

That is the statement that you made.
And I said that it's misleading since it assigns fault to only one half of the problem. In other words it was made out of the proper context.

The fact is, you have no idea what 'my view of the latter 20th century' is, because you read ONE statement, which was 100% factual, and which you have yet to refute.

Well gee, if I your views don't coincide with your words then you either have a split-personality disorder or are a pathological liar.

And since you're saying that you mean the opposite of what you say/post then we must be in agreement and there's nothing to argue about.
You would have saved me a lot of typing if you'd just attached your implied /sarcasm tags.

I could say YOU have a sterilized view of history, since you failed to mention the role of colonialism, the role of unionism, the role of religion including animism and islam, catholicism and protestantism, tribalism and the price of tea in China. Fortunately for YOU, I don't need to read things INTO what other people say.

Maybe because the Cold War was primarily between capitalism and communism rather than between animism and catholism.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.