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02/02/2006:

"Africa's hunger - a systemic crisis"

More than half of Africa is now in need of urgent food assistance.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is warning that 27 sub-Saharan countries now need help.

But what appear as isolated disasters brought about by drought or conflict in countries like Somalia, Malawi, Niger, Kenya and Zimbabwe are - in reality - systemic problems.

It is African agriculture itself that is in crisis, and according to the International Food Policy Research Institute, this has left 200 million people malnourished.

It is particularly striking that the FAO highlights political problems such as civil strife, refugee movements and returnees in 15 of the 27 countries it declares in need of urgent assistance. By comparison drought is only cited in 12 out of 27 countries.

The implication is clear - Africa's years of wars, coups and civil strife are responsible for more hunger than the natural problems that befall it.
bbc.co.uk

I find it 'particularly striking' that in this whole raft of articles by the BBC that no mention is made of IMF/World Bank 'development goals' that mandate cash-cropping that exhaust the land and make it impossible for Africa to feed itself.

In the last days, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch Shell have announced staggering record-profits, attributing this to 'rising gas and oil prices', failing to mention their oil extraction actvities in West Africa.

By all means, blame Africa's situation on the ineptitude of Africa without a mention of continuing Western pillage.


Can aid do more harm than good?
What is to be done?

Mr Easterly and others are not arguing that the solution to perverse incentives lies in withholding emergency aid.

They contend that it could be made to work better in a number of ways, including:

-Providing compensation to local farmers
-Making sure aid stops when things improve
-Giving hungry families cash rather than food
-But the most effective move would be to focus less on emergencies and more on chronic problems. Mr Easterly says this could be done cheaply in the Sahel.

Improving access to clean water and distributing re-hydration tablets, for instance, would help eradicate diarrhoea, which drains nutrients away and makes children particularly vulnerable.

Tony Vaux, for his part, calls on the media to present a balanced picture of the situation of the ground, and not see their role as promoting the NGOs public appeals.

But he does not hold out much hope.

"When I first joined Oxfam in 1972 there was a famine in the Sahel, exactly like the famine today," he recalls.

Three decades and umpteen appeals later the same emergencies keep recurring, he says ruefully.
The NGOs bread and butter depends on the existence of hunger forever. In Dickens' Bleak House there is a woman who is busily wringing her hands and gathering up aid for the Poor Black People of Africa while her unkempt children are tumbling into the fireplace of her filthy house.