Famine in Africa
Africa starves as rains fail and rulers reap profits
As millions go hungry, some African leaders have splashed out on jets and fleets of cars. Paul Harris reports from Eritrea and Malawi on a natural disaster compounded by war and corruption Sunday January 19, 2003
The UK Observer
Despite the half-light inside the dilapidated hospital at Sanafe, signs of famine are written clearly on Susana's body. Her skin is sallow and hangs loosely off her tiny body. She looks newborn, but is in fact a year old.
Outside, the Eritrean sun beats down. At least the hospital provides shelter from the heat. 'I brought her here because I have nothing to eat for her,' said her mother, Zaid Burher. 'I want her to live.'
Two thousand miles to the south, another baby is dying. Two-year-old David Banda cries weakly as he lies on the floor of Malawi's Ngabu hospital. His belly is swollen and his limbs look like twigs.
'He is too weak to lift his head now,' said his mother, Emily. She, too, has no food.
David and Susana, and their mothers, are separated by half a continent and gulfs of ethnicity, language and culture. Yet they are united by one thing: hunger. Vast swaths of Africa are starving. On an unprecedented scale a belt of famine, drought and disaster stretches from Sudan to Swaziland.
In the Horn of Africa, about 14 million people in Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea are going hungry. In six southern African countries a further 15 million desperately need food aid. When other regions are added, the grim total tops 38 million starving Africans.
They are victims of a terrible drought. Fields lie empty, harvests have failed and livestock are dying. But the famine has other, man-made, causes. War, politics and corruption have played a deadly role. Africa's governments must shoulder much of the blame. And, finally, Aids has infected millions, killing the youngest and the strongest.
A huge aid effort is under way, but Judith Lewis, head of the World Food Programme in southern Africa, is realistic about the challenge: 'Where can we start?'
The Hazemo plains are the breadbasket of Eritrea. Sandwiched between jagged mountain ranges, the 30,000 acres of fertile black soil are dotted with productive farms. But not this year. Eritrea's rains have failed. Barren earth stretches into the horizon. A hot wind blows away the topsoil. Ploughing the fields has produced nothing but stones.
Mehan Gebremichael, 48, should be bringing in his crop. But, sitting listlessly under a tree in his village, he has nothing to do. In July he sowed his fields with millet and sorghum, but the rains never came. Now he relies on aid handouts and the meagre, pooled resources of the village. 'I have never seen a drought like this,' he said.
In some northern areas there have been four years of failed rains. But this year, the usually fertile southern areas, like Hazemo, were struck down, too. The country's harvest was 10 per cent of normal. Now aid agencies believe 2.4m out of a population of 3.5m do not have enough to eat. WFP is providing food for 900,000 of them.
Across the country people are on the move, taking their herds with them. When migration begins, then mass famine, like that in Ethiopia in 1984, is not far behind.
'Seventy per cent of people are starving, but society has not yet started to disintegrate. We are late, but we can still make it,' said Christian Balslev-Olesen, Eritrea's Unicef representative.
The disaster is clear at the Hazemo town of Tsorona. In the dry riverbed, people have dug deeper and deeper wells, 12 feet down into the sand. A man standing in the bottom passes up buckets of muddy water to the people and animals waiting above.
Omar Hassan, 51, has herded his cattle for two hours to get here after his own well dried. He has lost 15 cows and is desperate to keep his remaining ones alive. 'I must come here every day just to drink. Some of us are going to die,' he said.
IN MALAWI, too, the rains have failed. The maize harvest has been badly hit. Farmers count on reliable rainfall to produce the staple crop, but recently the rains have been erratic and light. Last year, across most of the centre and south of Malawi, the maize crop failed. This year the rains began a month late. Some forecasters predict they will also end early.
Drier weather has brought forth a plague of army worms and tiny green caterpillars which have munched their way through many fields.
WFP estimates it will be feeding 3.5 m Malawians, 35 per cent of the population, by the end of March. Downpours have caused flash floods, washing away bridges and riverside fields. The floods led President Bakili Muluzi to declare a national disaster this month.
Many aid agencies blame the effects of global warming. As the world's climate warms up, Africa is becoming more prone to drought and the pattern of the rains has been violently disrupted. 'We are going to see more, not less, extreme weather,' said Lewis.
Far to the east, the waters of the Pacific have started to warm, the first stage in a natural phenomenon known as El Niño that disrupts the world's weather cycles. It promises Africa another year of drought and floods.
Behane Negase, 71, is herding his animals in search of water on the dried-out Asmara plateau, about 30 miles south of the Eritrean capital. His crops have failed and he laughs angrily when asked what he will do. 'We expect God or our government to help us,' he said. Neither appears to be listening.
Certainly the Eritrean government has contributed much to the disaster. It is an old rule that famines rarely occur in countries with a free press and elected governments. Eritrea has neither. President Issayas Afewerki rules a one-party state.
In 2001, dozens of journalists and politicians who had called for democracy were arrested without charge or trial. They are still in jail. All independent newspapers have been closed down.
Mindful of its recent border war with Ethiopia, the government has embarked on a programme of national service that sees all men between 18 and 40 called up for three years or longer. Men, including some working for UN aid agencies, have been press-ganged from the streets. The result is a massive depopulation of the people most able to till the fields and fetch water.
Shabet village is a collection of mud and straw huts high in the mountains. It is hot and dusty; a marginal life at the best of times. But these are not good times.
Huliwa Ahmed and Mariam Mohamed are neighbours. They have large families, but every one of their eight thin, sickly children has an ugly, hacking cough. They have harvested nothing. They have to walk two hours to find a well with water. Their husbands have been drafted into national service and the fields have gone unploughed.
'Look,' Huliwa said, 'this is a village of women and children. We have no men. Our men support the government, but the government does not support us.'
Working as an aid agency is difficult in such a regime. After almost four decades of war, Eritrea is estimated to have 3m mines and unexploded ordnance on its soil. Large areas of productive farmland are rendered unusable. Yet last year, President Issayas ordered foreign mine-clearing groups to leave the country. No reason was given.
Malawi's government has played a role in its own disaster. Before the outbreak of famine last year, Malawi secretly sold the country's own state grain reserves. After months of investigations, the country's Anti-Corruption Bureau has concluded that senior officials sold off the reserves and pocketed the cash. Gilton Chi waula, the bureau's head, said most of the 166,000 tonnes of maize went to senior politicians, who then resold it, some of it abroad. One of those named by the bureau as involved in the scam is Leonard Mangulama, ironically Minister responsible for poverty alleviation.
While millions of Malawians face starvation, one of the main concerns of President Muluzi is trying to change the constitution to allow him to stand for a third term in elections next year.
Not that Eritrea and Malawi are alone in Africa when it comes to irresponsible government. In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe's brutal and disastrous destruction of white farms has helped propel more than 7m Zimbabweans towards famine. Yet Mugabe himself has just bought a fleet of Mercedes. At his wife Grace's thirty-ninth birthday party, state-controlled newspapers printed a front-page picture of Mugabe feeding her cake.
In Swaziland, King Mswati III has just bought a new private jet for £28m. Yet a quarter of his country needs food aid, 22 per cent of them have HIV, and the entire Swazi health budget is £12.6m.
Deep in the Malawian countryside lie the most pitiful victims of the disaster. A walk down a track between fields of stunted maize leads to a hut in the village of Maranga, near to the border with Mozambique. Egiheit Poul is 39 years old, but she looks like an old woman. Her skin is wrinkled and she speaks in a hoarse whisper.
Her legs are covered with open sores and are too weak for her to walk. Her daughters carry her around on a chair. Egiheit has Aids. She is part of an epidemic that has swept through Africa like a modern Black Death.
One in seven Malawians has the virus. It has wiped out the young men and women of many villages, leaving communities of orphans and grandparents. The only men in Poul's household are a shy boy of nine and a toddler. The rest have been claimed by the virus. As she talks of her failed harvest, she begins to cry.
'Only the grace of God has seen us survive, but now this year's crops are not looking the way they should. If I was healthy, I would try to work, but I do not know what I can do because I am like this,' she said.
Across the continent, 29.4m people are infected with Aids. They have few drugs to fight it and, as a result, are more vulnerable to famine.
In Malawi, for the first time the WFP has set up a programme to deliver food specifically for people affected by the epidemic. At Ngonga primary school about 200 kilometres from the capital Lilongwe, a huge crowd of people has gathered under the shade of a tree. Apart from a handful of young men, they are all women, children and the elderly. Each clutches a ration card and waits for hours until their name is read out. Then maize, peas and soya are weighed out and they retreat back into the bush with their food for the next month. All are victims of the virus.
In some regions most households are headed by women, as their husbands have died. In others, households consist entirely of orphan children. Such is the family of Francis Julius, 17, who is queuing patiently at Ngonga. He looks after three siblings after his parents both died from Aids. His mother died only last summer and they have struggled with no adults on their farm. 'Some days we go to sleep without food. It is difficult to sleep with an empty belly,' he said.
Africa is caught in a vicious cycle. The droughts, floods and HIV epidemic have led to an increasing dependency on aid, which is flowing into the continent in ever greater amounts. Food aid is now a focus of life. Now in rural Malawi, parents choose which school to send their children to, not due to its quality, but whether it benefits from free food for pupils.
Many aid workers and those in government are unhappy about this. All agree that the key to breaking the cycle of disaster and relief is sustainable development to help Africans feed themselves in hard times. That does not mean a future of endlessly sending sacks of maize to feed the hungry; it means improved farming methods, cheaper fertiliser, deeper wells, education for all and an end to corruption.
Dr Woldai Futur, economic adviser to Eritrea's President, is aware of the problem. Only planning for the long-term future will help Africa, will prevent the famines to come. But the world is not geared up for it. 'The world responds only to disaster. It does not try to prevent a disaster happening,' he said.
That is certainly true. The WFP was not set up as an emergency organisation. As recently as the mid-1980s, it used most of its budget in food for work, nutrition and education projects. But now 80 per cent of its work is emergency-driven.
If the African crisis is to be solved, the WFP must be given the funding to go back to its roots, and African governments must focus on development and democracy, not on war and self-enrichment. That is not happening now. In a statement to the UN Security Council last month, WFP chief James Morris said: 'WFP is now engaged in an exercise in triage among those threatened by starvation. Who will we feed? Who will we leave hungry?'
Back in the hospital at Ngabu, David Banda was oblivious to such questions. As his mother stroked his emaciated thigh, he began to sleep, ignoring the flies buzzing around him. His ragged T-shirt exposed the lines of his ribs. 'I am very worried for him,' said his mother. 'He has been losing weight for days and days.'
David is at least getting treatment. He is being cared for and fed. He may recover enough to be discharged.
But, as the ward nurse whispered out of earshot, there is little hope for him once he leaves. 'There is nothing out there. That's the problem. We can feed them here, but in two weeks they will be back,' she said.
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"We must stand together, the four sacred colors of humanity, as the one family that we are, in the interest of peace. We must unite the religions of the world as a spiritual force strong enough to prevail in peace. We human beings are a spiritual energy that is thousands of times stronger than nuclear energy. Our energy is the combined will of all the people with the spirit of the natural world, to be of one body, one heart, and one mind for peace."
--Leon Shenandoah, Tadadaho for the Haudenausenee (Iroquois Six Nations):
