Famine in Africa Means the Poor Can't Buy Food
January 10, 2006
Nizar Visram
Nairobi
originally published in The East African
According to the World Food Programme 25,000 people die from hunger and poverty every day in Africa.
More than 34 million people are at risk of starvation as famine unfolds from Ethiopia and Eritrea in East Africa to
Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland in Southern Africa. The situation is equally
critical in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania and Niger in the west. Niger made headlines when hundreds of its people
died of hunger in September last year.
In Malawi, we are told, food shortages are threatening half the population. As a result, President Bingu wa
Mutharika has declared a state of national disaster in all districts of Malawi. At least five million people in the
country may require food assistance until the next harvest season.
The number of people in Zambia needing food assistance could rise to two million. In Zimbabwe, the number of
people requiring food assistance is likely to rise from 2.9 to 4.9 million. Nearly 594,500 people in 35 districts of
Tanzania will also require food assistance from now until next January.
AID AGENCIES say if increased shipments of food aid are not delivered in time, African populations will face
conditions similar to the Ethiopia famine of 1984-85.
In fact, FAO says the situation is so bad that the continent is unlikely to attain the target of food self-sufficiency by
2015.
An appeal has been sent out for urgent donations for $400 million to help feed people in the six countries of
Southern Africa before the harvest in April. The United States, the biggest donor so far, has given $100 million,
while the European Union has provided $64 million.
But emergency food aid to Africa is fraught with problems. One has to go beyond the figures. Recently, in the US
there was a proposal to buy food in Africa to be supplied to Africa instead of paying large sums to ship it all the way
from the US.
IT WAS suggested that not only would the food get to Africa in weeks instead of months, the government would
save money and also "boost" African farmers.
Many, even in the Bush administration, saw this as a sensible and cost-effective proposal yet it faced strong
opposition in Congress. Why? Because it challenges the main premise of US food aid, namely that American food
aid must benefit not just the world's hungry but also American agriculture.
This is the spirit behind the US law that stipulates that all food aid be grown by American farmers and mostly
shipped on US-flag vessels. The proposal to change this policy faced opposition from three interest groups, known
as the Iron Triangle of Food Aid. These are agribusiness, the shipping industry and charitable organisations.
AS FOR agribusiness, just four corporate giants and their subsidiaries sold more than half the $700 million in food
provided through USAid in 2004.
On the second side of the triangle are five shipping companies that received over half the more than $300 million
spent to ship that food.
Finally, on the third side are at least seven not-for-profit organisations.
In 2001, they depended on food aid for up to half their budgets. It all boils down to the fact that at least 50 per cent
of each dollar spent on food aid is spent on transport, storage and administrative costs.
That is what Oxfam had in mind when it pointedly noted that the current system of food aid offered "too many
opportunities for a variety of private interests to skim off benefits in the procurement, packaging, transportation and
distribution of commodities." We need to go beyond the pros and cons of food aid and see why we need emergency
food supplies in the first place.
A report by Food First: Institute for Food and Development Policy released in 2002 shows how the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund, backed by the financial and political muscle of the West, have exacerbated famine in
Africa through structural adjustment programmes.
THE REPORT says, "Famine does not arise spontaneously with the failure of a harvest season; rather it is the
outcome of a system that places greater importance upon the market than upon those going hungry." Thus we are
told famine is due to multiple factors, both natural and man-made. These include government policy and the
HIV/Aids factor.
Poverty is rarely mentioned. Yet, according to the World Food Programme, Lesotho has no food shortages in the
markets but two-thirds of its population are classified as destitute. They are the subject of the "famine" in Lesotho.
In other words, famine is often caused not by a lack of food, but by poverty.
There are other such myths that try to "explain" why Africa is plagued with perennial famine. We are told there is
not enough food to go around. Yet the world produces enough wheat, rice and other grains to provide every human
being with 3,500 calories a day.
The problem is that many people are too poor to buy available food. Even most "hungry countries" have enough
food for all their people right now. Many of them are in fact net exporters of food and other agricultural products.
Another myth is that nature is to blame for famine. The reality is that food is always available for those who can
afford it - starvation hits only the poorest.
Millions live on the brink of disaster in Africa and elsewhere, because they are deprived of land by a powerful few.
Our institutions and policies determine who eats and who starves during hard times.
Then there is the myth of the Green Revolution, which we are told is the answer to increased crop yields. Our
governments and their advisers talk of large-scale commercial agriculture as panacea.
We are told of the Green Revolution success stories in India, Mexico, and the Philippines, where grain production
and exports have climbed. Yet even in these countries hunger has persisted. This is because the Green Revolution
comes with the controversial biogenetic engineering of food, combined with patents on food and seeds.
This only threatens to make the situation worse, since the poor will not be able to pay the royalties on the patents,
even if the food supply is increased in this way.
Free markets, privatisation and deregulation are other myths, as they do not address the causes of hunger.
Governments have a vital role to play in countering the tendency toward economic concentration.
This can be done through genuine taxation, macrofinancing, and land reforms.
Parallel to this is the myth of free trade as a way to alleviate hunger. In most countries, exports have boomed while
hunger has continued unabated or actually worsened.
Brazil has boosted its soybean production to feed Japanese and European livestock while within the country hunger
spreads as the majority of people are too poor to buy the food grown by themselves.
Food aid also often works against the hungry as it is in most cases used to impose free trade and free market
policies, to promote exports at the expense of food production.
So, we must face up to the real questions: who controls the land? Who cultivates it?
A few or all who need to? What will be grown - strawberries to export to the West or basic grains for local
consumption?
How can the control and use of land be given back into the hands of the people who need it? Who influences the
production and distribution of food?
Only by freeing ourselves from the grip of these widely held myths can we grasp the root causes of hunger.