While development will determine
Africa's long-term future, the most pressing need is food. Across
a great swath of southern Africa, three years of alternating floods
and drought have put millions of people on the cusp of catastrophe.
Aid agencies say that unless food aid is adequately delivered in the
next three months, up to 12 million Africans face starvation. For
many of them, supplies from South Africa, which has been spared the
devastation, will be their only means of survival.
Famine disaster areas have been declared in most southern African
states, including Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland,
Zambia and Zimbabwe. In rural Malawi, peasants are chewing on sawdust,
mutilating each other and fighting to the death over scattered corn
cobs in dried-up fields. In Swaziland, children are being sent into
the mountains to search for wild fruits and berries and in Mozambique,
men are catching crocodiles with their bare hands for food. Médecins
sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) last month reported
finding an entire town of 18,000 people dying of hunger in the remote
southwest of Angola. "If not enough relief comes soon, we'll have
an all-out disaster on our hands," says Judith Lewis, the World Food
Program's regional director for eastern and southern Africa. The WFP
is already feeding 3.6 million famine victims in southern Africa.
Not all food problems are the result of natural disasters. In Zimbabwe,
two years of civil instability and so-called land reform — in
which "war veterans" were encouraged to seize some of the most productive
land from white farmers — have exacerbated an already critical
situation. Since the land grab began, there has been a 60% drop in
agricultural production, and the government now needs to import about
1.5 million tons of maize and wheat to feed its people. With foreign
exchange low, Zimbabwe, an international pariah after this year's
blatantly rigged presidential election, finds itself begging for food.
In Malawi, meanwhile, the U.N. estimates that up to 4 million people
— about 40% of the population — need food. The IMF, Britain
and the European Union have frozen $75 million in monetary aid pending
an investigation into the disappearance and alleged private sale of
167,000 tons of emergency grain reserves. In many of the affected
countries, internal conflict with refugees and displaced people fleeing
civil instability compounds the problem of food supplies, while in
all of them aids adds to the decrease in agricultural productivity
and the increase in malnutrition, as well as the number of people
physically incapable of surviving food shortages.
The fight against famine is already lending itself to African partnerships.
South Africa and states in East Africa are combining their commercial
maize surpluses through the Southern African Development Community
(SADC) for delivery to stricken countries. But huge amounts of grain
will have to be imported from the U.S. and elsewhere to meet the shortfall.
Forecasters are already saying there may be more floods this year
and another El Niño-effect drought in 2003. "If the crops fail
again on the same magnitude, the scale of the problem will be unimaginable,"
says the WFP's Lewis. While self-sufficiency is Africa's goal, feeding
all of its naturally disadvantaged people is something the continent
simply cannot do on its own.
