Posted on 08/06/2002 4:45:38 AM PDT by Clive
Southern Africa is verging on a famine that shouldn't be happening. It's winter now, and the fall harvest should have provided more than enough food for people to fill their bellies with the local staple of mealie-meal, a sort of milled corn cooked into a thick porridge.
Instead, a rapidly deteriorating political situation in Zimbabwe, the area's largest food exporter, has merged with a regional drought to cause the worst food crisis in at least 10 years. Families in parts of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Lesotho, and Swaziland are eating strange foods now: baobab fruits and wild roots if they're lucky, boiled leaves if they're not. There's little surplus food left in these countries, which means that even some urban dwellers with money struggle to find food.
"We believe famine can be averted if huge shipments of food start arriving fast into the country," says Makena Walker, spokeswoman for the World Food Program in Zimbabwe. Fast, she adds, means, "immediately."
No one knows just how many people need food to avert a famine - nobody has ever seen a crisis like this one. In some of the affected countries, more than a quarter of the people are HIV positive, and AIDS will begin killing a starving body much faster than hunger alone.
The World Food Program is asking for about a million tons of food to feed 12.7 million people through March, but it's in the middle of revising its numbers upward.
Even the amount currently requested will only cover about a third of the region's total food deficit. The other two million tons will have to come in through market-priced imports. That means area governments have to avoid price controls and artificial exchange rates that usually make imports too expensive.
"If the governments don't do practical things to empower the commercial sector to import commercial maize, it will be a problem," says Roger Winter, deputy administrator for democracy, conflict, and humanitarian assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development. "While we're doing everything we can on the food aid side, they need to stimulate the private sector."
But Zimbabwe, where six million people are now at risk of starving, seems intent on making the hunger pangs sharper. "Every single decision that the Zimbabwean government has made in the last six months, even if they don't intend it, is exacerbating the crisis," says USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios. "And that's making a small food shortage into a famine."
The roots of the current crisis were planted in early 2000 when a crumbling Zimbabwean economy, frustration with the costs of supporting the war in the Congo, and discontent with his increasingly ironfisted rule posed the first serious threat to President Robert Mugabe since he assumed leadership of Zimbabwe in 1980, the year the country gained its independence.
Mugabe needed an issue with which to parry a newly formed opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change, and he seized upon land reform. More than half of the country's arable land was held by whites, who constituted less than 2 percent of the population.
Land reform had been bandied about for 20 years, but Mugabe embarked upon it with a vengeance in February 2000.
He began by violently seizing the country's fantastically productive commercial farms and then destroying them by redistributing the land to political supporters in his Zanu PF party and to settlers led by his so-called "liberation war veterans," most of whom were actually unemployed youths marauding as government-sponsored thugs.
The two years of land reform have also displaced more than 100,000 black farmworkers who worked the profitable farms, decreased the amount of total tilled land by more than 60 percent, and convinced many foreign investors that southern Africa is a poor place for investment.
Mugabe, however, has insisted in his recent speeches that land reform is an unparalleled success and will lead to increased agricultural production.
Mugabe's real goal is political survival, says John Prendergast, Africa program co-director for the International Crisis Group, a private think tank. "It was to maintain power for Zanu PF and to create a legacy that he completed the liberation process that started in 1980 with political liberation and concluded in 2002 with economic liberation." Mugabe's legacy, however, looks to be a country that has gone from being the breadbasket of southern Africa to the local basket case. "Because Zimbabwe was a major exporter of food to the region," says Prendergast, "and it would have been this year despite the drought, [Mugabe's policies] have contributed greatly to the wider food crisis in neighboring countries."
The crisis worsened in March 2002, when Zanu PF secured an election victory - through violence, intimidation, and fraud - over the Movement for Democratic Change. Since then, Mugabe has further consolidated power by accelerating land seizures and relying on increasingly draconian political tactics. According to a report from the Crisis Group, ZANU-PF has detained more than 1,000 opposition activists and critics, arrested many journalists, used systematic campaigns of rape against women who support the MDC or who are married to members of the opposition party, and pushed 300,000 people into internal displacement through violence.
And now the party is using hunger as a political weapon. Both senior officials and local militias from the Zanu PF party have prevented opposition supporters from purchasing scarce food in some places and from receiving donated food in others.
A Zanu PF deputy minister, Abednico Ncube, told a crowd waiting to purchase corn in July that all corn sales would soon be restricted to Zanu PF supporters. "As long as you value the government of the day, you will not starve, but we do not want people who vote for colonialists and then come to us when they want food. You cannot vote for the MDC and expect Zanu PF to help you," he said.
An aid program run by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, which provided food to 40,000 children, was shut down for a month by Zanu PF enforcers, who accused the group of spreading MDC propaganda.
Politicizing food aid, said USAID's Natsios, whose staff has confirmed some reports of interference, is unacceptable. "We will shut down food distributions if we find out that they are denying food assistance to people because they opposed President Mugabe in the last election."
Instead of trying to get more food into the country by changing economic policies that restrict the quantity of imported grain, or even by stabilizing the country's collapsing agricultural sector, Mugabe has responded to the food crisis he helped create by ordering 3,000 of the country's remaining large-scale farmers to vacate their land by August 10.
He blames the threat of famine entirely on the drought, telling his parliament, "We fight the present drought with our eyes clearly set on the future of the agricultural sector.... We dare not endanger its future through misplaced decisions based on acts of either desperation or expediency." In the meantime, according to the BBC, roadsides in the country are lined with villagers waiting days in the hope of a food delivery, and crowds of urban shoppers swarm grocery stores when scarce stocks finally do arrive.
If nothing changes, says J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the food crisis will worsen this fall when the meager harvests are entirely depleted.
That could trigger a flood of refugees fleeing into South Africa and Botswana. "So far, the region has been unwilling or unable to act in some concerted, clear fashion to stop this tyrant from destroying the region and his country," Morrison says, but "massive migration will change the regional calculus overnight."
Prendergast thinks it's already too late to avoid pockets of severe hunger, although a full-scale famine will likely be averted. "The [low] purchasing power of poorer Zimbabweans, the use of food as a political weapon, and the lateness of the [international] response mean that thousands of people will be at risk of starvation by September, regardless of how robust the overall response is by then," he says.
So far, the United States has taken the global lead on preventing a dawning food disaster. Washington has committed 292,000 tons of aid to date and is pressuring other governments to help provide the needed one million tons.
But relief agencies say that food is needed now. The rainy season begins in October, and floods isolate many rural villages in the region for weeks at a time. It takes several months to order, purchase, ship, and deliver food. By the time children appear on television with distended bellies, it will be too late.
"We need to pre-position 350,000 tons in areas that will be inaccessible after October," says Khaled Mansour, spokesman for the World Food Program in New York.
USAID's Winter says that the United States will meet any deficit in aid to southern Africa if the global commitment starts to fall short. But, he says, between Afghanistan, the Sudan, and southern Africa, it's a tough year for emergencies. "Our food commitments were very heavy this year," he says. "Budgeted levels have been stretched very thin."
In southern Africa, few share Winter's confidence that a crisis can be averted. Relief workers are trying to feed populations already ravaged by AIDS and trying not to think too much about the future. "One really doesn't take the time to dwell on the worst-case scenario if no grain comes in," says Rudo Kwaramba, a worker with World Vision in Zimbabwe. "It's simply too dismal for us to think about."
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The main problem with sending food is that it will get confiscated by Mugabe and distributed to his cronies. The dispossessed white farmers and the anti-Mugabe MDC WILL be allowed to starve, by Mugabe himself. That's part of his plan, just like old Joe Stalin did to the Ukraine.
Mugabe is practicing Maoist Communism in it's crudest form. His most outspoken supporter seems to be Moammar Khadaffy, and we all know the crowd that he hangs out with. It's not much of a stretch to wonder how much influence Al Quaeda has with this extremely anti-western regime.
I know others will take issue with my position, but if I've ever seen a situation just begging for CIA intervention, this is it. Without some sort of outside support, there is no way to mount an effective internal opposition against this kind of despotism. If nature is allowed to take it's course in the form of mass starvation, I fear that this will be the next Somalia.
Yeah, but we'll FEEL good about ourselves. Mugabe is not stupid, he's just ruthless and understands exactly how stupid we are.
Africa is what Africans have made it.
Sending them food is beyond a disgrace. Want to help? Send them some guns and see if they have the stomach to fight this Marxist madman.
Be careful of what you vote for. You just may get it.
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