When Aid Is Not Enough

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It didn't take long. The promise by the G-8 leaders meeting in Scotland early last month to "combat world poverty and save and improve human life" had barely been made when the images of starving Africans filled our television screens. In Niger some 2.5 million people face starvation, according to aid agencies and the United Nations World Food Program (wfp). Badly malnourished children are dying and thousands more are at risk. How can this be happening again?

The depressing answer: all too easily. The G-8 pledges of debt relief and a doubling of aid were never going to change the continent overnight. For one thing, many of the details of how those promises will be implemented still have to be worked out. That's if they are implemented at all — Canada, Germany and Italy are already backpedaling on their commitments and the World Bank is muttering that forgiving poor countries' debt will hurt its loan program to other poor countries. Assuming pledges are met, the financial boost should help the best-managed African countries spend more on health, education and infrastructure. But the images from Niger are a timely reminder that helping Africa is not only difficult but sometimes near impossible.

The immediate reasons for the crisis in Niger are simple. The vast country, bigger than Britain, France and Germany combined, sits astride the southern edge of the Sahara in a belt of dry savanna known as the Sahel. In good years, farmers there grow enough food for their families plus a bit extra that they can sell or store away. But the past couple of years have been tough. Last year a swarm of locusts and poor rains ruined most of the crop, forcing the people of Niger to dig into their reserves. The next crops won't be ready until later this year. Until then, thousands of people will go hungry. "Whole families are suffering because of a desperate shortage of food, which has forced them to eat just one meal a day of maize, leaves or wild fruits," wfp's executive director James Morris said last week.

Niger has been here before. Between 1968 and 1973 a severe drought across the Sahel killed as many as a quarter of a million people. In The Fate of Africa, an excellent new history of the continent since independence, writer Martin Meredith explains that drought "was only one aspect of the problem." Rapid population growth had forced peasants northward into pastoral areas that were too arid for permanent farms. "The overall result was overgrazing, overcultivation and deforestation on a catastrophic scale." A massive Western relief effort poured some $7.5 billion of aid into the region. "But all the efforts had little lasting impact," writes Meredith. Much of the aid went to civil servants, soldiers and the police. Some was squandered by local élites. The population continued to grow.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to help again, of course. Niger first warned it may face trouble last November; the world has been slow to realize how bad things were and to respond. But even if aid had come quicker, the situation shows how intractable some of Africa's problems are. The bitter truth is that there are some countries in Africa that will have trouble pulling themselves out of poverty no matter how much help they get. Niger, the second poorest country in the world, is one such place. It has uranium (a fact many people now know, thanks to President Bush's reference to the country in his pre–Iraq invasion State of the Union address), and it attracts adventurous tourists to the fascinating town of Agadez and the stunning Air region of the Sahara. It also exports small amounts of black-eyed peas and onions. But beyond that Niger doesn't have much that can make it better off. Its government is a reasonably good one by historic standards, but good governance alone won't cure all the country's problems. Even reducing agricultural subsidies in the rich world is unlikely to prove the boon to Niger that it could be to other African countries. Unfortunately for Niger, geography is more important than governance or markets. Landlocked and mostly desert, Niger is close to being a country that shouldn't exist, a hardscrabble land fenced into an uneconomic box by colonial-era borders.

So what to do? It's worth pushing on with debt relief, reduced agricultural subsidies and increased aid — and shaming those countries that don't follow through on their promises. It's also incumbent upon us to feed the starving victims of the drought — and figure out a way to get aid to people more quickly. But it's also important to recognize that the path out of poverty will not be found in a single meeting of a rich club or even a dozen of them. Niger represents the hardest case in any serious effort to help Africa. Morally, we should do all we can to assist the poorest. But we need to understand that sometimes even that will not be enough.