Famine in Zimbabwe

Natal Witness ^ | July 16, 2002 | Mercedes Sayagues

[Clive]

"A free press is the best famine early-warning system," I argued at an international conference on media and development in Geneva in 1991.

My paper followed Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's theory: democratic countries with a free press do not have famines. A free press warns about the threat and puts pressure on leaders to act quickly while there is time to avert starvation. Elected governments may be callous or sluggish but they will act on the famine or risk losing the next election.

The following year, on July 13, 1992, I arrived in Zimbabwe as spokeswoman for the regional humanitarian operation of the World Food Programme. Southern Africa was in the grip of the worst drought in living memory. Eighteen million people needed 5,9 million tons of food. The region rose to meet the challenge. The SADC was at its best. The Harare-based relief operation was a carefully planned, brilliant example of regional co-operation. At the Grain Operations Control Centre in Johannesburg, white officials from the apartheid regime co-ordinated cross-border rail, road and port traffic with black counterparts from frontline states.

Today, TV and newspapers carry pictures from Zimbabwe similar to those I took. Unloading maize bags from trucks. School kids seated in a circle eating nourishing porridge. Women queuing for food aid. But wait. There is a difference in the pictures. People are noticeably thinner and poorer. Their clothes are ragged. A lot more children are barefoot. Faces express fear, weariness and desperation. They look like Mozambican peasants when their civil war ended in 1992.

Zimbabweans are much poorer now. Incomes have halved since independence in 1980. Unbudgeted payments to the war veterans and joining the war in the DRC ruined the economy in 1998. Then came land invasions and the destruction of commercial agriculture.

The Zimbabwean dollar was eight to one U.S. dollar in 1992. Now it is a whopping 800 to one. Unemployment stands at 60%. Annual inflation is 122%.

Worse, Zimbabwe is a fractured society. When Robert Mugabe unleashed his brutal militia to beat up, rape and torture the opposition, the social cohesion that makes countries work was shattered. As the culture of violence and impunity extends, the fractures grows deeper. This is how ethnic war and bloody uprisings start - if only the people were less hungry, poor and fearful.

What else is different now?

Infrastructure. Can hold. There has been adequate maintenance but no investment on expanding the road and rail networks. Wagons are old, turnaround is slow, and feeder roads will be impassable in the rainy season, but overall it is not too bad. Human resources. Deteriorating. Due to corruption, political persecution and low salaries, many experienced staff at the Grain Marketing Board and other key parastatals have left. However, some experienced people remain. NGOs. Overstretched. By late 2001, says a recent report by Oxfam, more than half of Zimbabwe's 1 500 NGOs were no longer operating due to funding problems and the political crisis.

People. Pushed to the limit. One reason is HIV/Aids: one in four adults is infected. Another is poverty: six out of 10 Zimbabweans are poor. One-third of jobs have been lost since 2000, says the finance minister. One million farm workers and their families have been displaced by farm invasions. Shantytowns are mushrooming. A health system that used to be decent is now comparable to Angola's, only the hospitals are cleaner.

Government. Goes from blunder to blunder. In 1992, it reacted early, had surplus maize from previous years, forex to import food and goodwill from donors. Since 1999, cereal production has fallen by two-thirds, yet agriculture minister Joseph Made denied the shortages until last month. Zimbabwe needs 850,000 tons of food to feed half of its 13 million population. It cannot import it for lack of forex and will not allow the private sector to import either or the white commercial farmers to farm. The winter wheat may die. Towards the end of his political life, Mugabe succeeds in implementing his Maoist economic and political vision. (In China, under Mao Zedong, 23-30 million people died during the massive famine of 1958-61.)

Food distribution. Problematic. Requires what World Food Programme regional director Judith Lewis calls "an army of food monitors" to ensure that all the needy get food, not those with a ruling party card. Earlier this year, several NGOs had to stop food distribution because of interference by militia.

My old conference paper lies in a box at a friend's garage in Harare, left behind when I was expelled in 2001 - a minor casualty of the increasingly repressive regime. The real losers are black Zimbabweans. They have less health, less education, less income, fewer jobs and less food than 10 years ago. Their dreams of a better future for their children are shattered.

Sadly, Zimbabwe is proving Amartya Sen right.

[Clive]

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[tet68]

bump. Sadly this has barely begun.
Interesting figure on the Chinese famine, had not thought it that high.
6 to 10 was what I had read.

[guitfiddlist]

But the important thing to remember is that all this murderous repression, starvation, incompetence, and corruption are from a black government. And that's what all the Jesse Jacksonian scumbags and leftwing idiots said was important all along, if you can get them to acknowledge Zimbabwe at all. If you can, they'd probably look, nod their heads and say, "Our work is done here...time to move on to other hip causes."