Friday Food Politics: The East African famine and what it's got to do with us
Fri Jan 20, 2006 at 01:56:07 PM PDT
(From the diaries -- Plutonium Page.)
For the past several months, we have seen occasional news stories warning of an impending major famine in the countries of Kenya, Ethiopia, Burundi, Somalia, Eritrea and Tanzania. Low rainfall for the past three years has resulted in poor crop yields and also a significant water shortage for people and their grazing livestock. This past Wednesday, Kenya's minister for emergency operations revised December's estimate of 2.5 million Kenyans facing starvation upwards to 4 million. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization puts the regional figure at 11 million.
That's the immediate crisis-- details, and clues to the bigger picture, below the fold.
Livestock have already started dying in droves.
"The sheep have died, the cattle have died and now the more resilient animals such as goats and camels are dying through lack of grazing land and waters," said Ahmed Mohamed Farah, who works for a government body set up to monitor the drought.
"We know from experience that when camels start dying, humans are next."
Human deaths have begun to occur as well; while many news reports put this figure at around 40, on-the-ground anecdotal reports suggest it is already much higher. Violence due to economic desperation is rising too in consequence: 38 people were recently killed in a battle over livestock near the Kenya/Ethiopia border.
We often naively assume, living in this resource-rich land of ours, that African famines result on the whole from a lack of resources, from the vain attempt of millions of people to eke a living off a difficult, miserly landscape. These droughts, these famines-- they occur at regular intervals over the course of our lifetimes, and begin to seem inevitable. We send money, if our conscience pricks us, but forget perhaps to think about the structural causes.
In this case, however, many people are on record admitting that, not only is there "enough food in the world to feed everyone," but there is in fact enough food in Kenya and Ethiopia to feed everyone in Kenya and Ethiopia. Reports the Washington Post Jan. 8:
Enough food is grown in Kenya to feed all of its population of 33 million, but many citizens, especially the country's poor subsistence farmers, cannot afford it. When the rains ceased last year, the farmers were left with parched crops, hungry livestock and nothing to eat.
"The month of December 2005 will be remembered for a long time to come by Kenyans as a time when people were starving to death while others were feasting," said Gullet Abbas, secretary general of the Kenya Red Cross Society.
The World Food Program asserts that "There is enough food in Ethiopia to meet immediate needs, but security or logistic woes could threaten future supplies."
The maize surplus generated in the west of Kenya this year, where rainfall has been better, is being sold for export rather than being redistributed to those who are going hungry within the country. Government corruption and economic inequality are even more extreme in Kenya than they are in most other nations (Kenya has a Gini coefficient of .51-- see this Wikipedia entry if you wish to have Gini coefficients explained to you). This January 1, a vivid protest was mounted in Nairobi by Kenya's nomadic Masai (from the WaPo story cited above):
On New Year's Day, groups of angry Masai herders attempted to drive their emaciated cattle onto the manicured lawns of the presidential residence so their animals could graze on the thick carpets of green grass in the morning sun.
With a drought turning their fields and pastures into dusty gray wastelands, and with millions of people in the region facing a food shortage, the herders wanted to make a point, organizers of the action said.
"Africa is not so poor that it doesn't have enough food or grazing land to feed itself. There's plenty of food here," said Ben Ole Koissaba, a leader of the Masai, one of the largest and most powerful tribes in Kenya. "Many countries around the world face drought, but people don't starve. We think it's ludicrous for the government to treat its citizens this way. Why does this keep happening?"
What the above article does not make clear is that the Masai also have long considered Nairobi, which is situated in a relatively cool and rainy area, an important stop on their traditional grazing routes and a refuge during the dry season. Every year, this journey is made as a continuing reminder of their long-standing claim to graze there. However, "this year the move is one of desperation. Deforestation, poor food management and bad roads have combined to destroy pastures across the country." And this also is the first Kenyan president, Mwai Kibaki, to turn them away from his lawn.
Kibaki was elected in 2003 with great hope and excitement for reform of a government that was generally seen as highly corrupt. Unfortunately, Kenyans have been disappointed in Kibaki. "Frontline" reported that:
More than a year and half later, Kibaki has not fulfilled this pledge and the coalition party that elected him has collapsed. In addition, Kibaki's promises to tackle Kenya's endemic corruption appear to be hollow at best. By all accounts, government corruption has escalated since Kibaki took office--no mean feat, considering that [his predecessor Daniel arap] Moi's administration was considered one of the most corrupt in African history.
(On the other hand, US AID brags that its support for anti-corruption measures in Kenya has led to "a significant decline in both the number of bribes paid per person per year (from 28.8 to 9.4) and the cost of bribes to individuals per month (from $52 to $17)." One wonders how these data were collected.)
So local and regional corruption and inequity contribute hugely to the food distribution problem. In more subtle ways, the preoccupation of the international community with aims beyond "mere survival"-- an expression, perhaps, of global inequity-- intensifies these problems, or at least fails to usefully address them. The UK, as of Thursday, announced it was withholding all its planned humanitarian aid to Ethiopia in 2006 because of human rights concerns stemming from the aftermath of Ethiopia's recent elections. While support for civil and political rights is commendable, the loss of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid has the potential to doom many Ethiopians to starvation.
The U.S. provides humanitarian aid to Kenya, but the budget for this in 2006 is about half what it was in 2004 (for numbers, go to this page and click on the "Program Summary Tables" link). In general, what the United States wants to give Kenya is not exactly what Kenya wants to receive. In a White House meeting with Kibaki in 2003, Bush was said to focus almost exclusively on Kenyan contributions to the "War on Terror," while Kibaki endured some private frustration that his nation's economic concerns were not sufficiently addressed. Their joint press conference betrays some of these differences:
Kibaki (wryly): But we definitely do gain by talking to friends like America and seeking help. Now, if you are seeking for help you cannot say publicly whether it is adequate or whether it is not.
Bush (gamely responds): Let me tell you, in many ways we're the country asking for help. We asked the president of Kenya for help in fighting terror. And the response has been strong. And we appreciate that response.
Alex Owina, a marketing consultant to the Kenyan government quoted in the Frontline piece, commented: "For the U.S., Africa only matters in two dimensions; the war on terror, and the disease burden, which is AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis. They matter because they have an adverse affect on America."
To see why Africa matters to President Bush, one has only to look at his Presidential Initiatives. What he called the "East African Terrorist Initiative" (actually the East Africa Counterterrorism Initiative) allotted $100 million, about twice this year's regular Kenyan aid budget, to counterterrorism efforts in several East African countries over the course of 15 months. (The bulk of this money went to Kenya.) On the other hand, the Presidential Initiative to End Hunger in Africa is funded somewhat less generously and does not seem to constitute much direct food aid, but rather "efforts to help African farmers harness science and technology." (Monsanto-watchers, you know what that means.)
In fact, the U.S. government's obsession with counterterrorism results not only in a diversion of funds from subsistence needs, but has actually resulted in anti-terrorism restrictions blocking food aid to Kenya from Muslim countries, according to the Muslim Youth of Kenya (NYK).
How much are we helping?
Another very serious way that we, as U.S. citizens, need to consider our own partial responsibility for this crisis pertains to global climate change. The UN Environment Program (UNEP) suggests that the current drought is intensified by such climate change; local deforestation, in turn, reduces the land's ability to retain what moisture does fall, leading to desertification. Klaus Toepfer, UNEP's executive director, asks donor countries to financially back plans for preserving natural capital, "as vital lynchpins for overcoming poverty and delivering sustainable and long-lasting economic development, while taking every possible measure to reduce the emissions of fossil fuels that are forcing up global temperatures." "Without these combined actions," Toepfer warned, "countries currently again facing water shortages and power rationing will continue to do so into the future with all the misery and economic damage this entails."
We environmentalists often speak abstractly of a possible future in which the burdens of environmental change wrought by the rich global North are borne by the world's poor in developing nations. It is essential to realize that that future is already upon us.
The Kenyan government has called for about $150 million over the next six months, to provide for about 2.5 million people (that's less than 10 bucks a person). The World Food Program is short about $44 million and will run out of food to distribute by the end of February without new donations.
We spend more than $150 million dollars on Iraq every day.
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Please feel free to lend your own expertise to discussion here; I am way beyond the boundaries of my own with this diary, but nevertheless wished to highlight the suffering that is taking place and some of the reasons for it.
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