Famine in Africa Means the Poor Can't Buy Food

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.

Nizar Visram is a political analyst based in Dar es Salaam

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the view of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy.