Putting the famine in context
Donders, J. G.
I J. G. DONDERS Putting the famine in context H E WAS AN Italian-Kenyan farmer, totally integrated into African life, the husband of a Kenyan woman. He spoke about the drought and the famine,...
...There has been but one exception of considerable interest: the cassava plant~ European farmers have discovered it as an excellent, cheap alternative fodder for their cattle, and are buying it from many third-world countries...
...Don't tell me that your right hand does not know what your left hand is doing...
...T HE SMALL country, Malawi, (population 6.2 million) can feed itself...
...Their produce may not be transported...
...The farmers in his region have no direct access to the market...
...DONDERS i$ the executive director of the Africa Faith and Justice Network, Washington, D.C...
...If Teachers had been content to explore these relationships, it might have made for a solid, even searing bit of social criticism...
...Malawi is unable to produce all the cereals needed for such bread...
...He grew up in one of those remarkable Amish communities in America which even nowadays doesn't use fertilizer or motorized farming equipment...
...India refused aid sent from the United States...
...II I ment can force farmers to sell only to official government buyers...
...The core could have been the basis of something useful -- the chance, perhaps, to provide a modem version of Up the Down Staircase or The Blackboard Jungle...
...But speaking of human rights in such terms is culturally determined...
...The bishop was, nevertheless, worrying about the future...
...You paralyze our productivity to enable your own survival...
...Malawi is one of the only African countries still exporting food to its neighbors...
...While other third-world countries spent about 5 percent of the aid given to them on rural development, Malawi spent almost all the help it received on such development...
...Tanzania will never get its farmers' union...
...H AROLD MILLER, a Mennonite working for the National Council of Churches in Kenya (NCCK), made that very clear...
...The population has begun to eat more and more bread...
...Animal husbandry followed a similar pattern...
...Is not that the reason that India can feed itself at the moment...
...As soon as one leaves the airport of the capital, Lilongwe, one sees large food silos shining in the sun...
...Consequently, the farmers are beRer paid...
...Local farmers started to cultivate and eat carrots, cauliflower, cabbage, onions, "Irish" potatoes, and maize...
...Mbeya is a region that had an abundant harvest this year, notwithstanding the terrible drought in other parts of the country...
...This is a very difficult dilemma: people are dying daily in over twenty-five African countries...
...But even in Malawi there are difficulties...
...Africa will become more and more dependent on the West and the North...
...Screen I I ALL OF THEM CATCHING UP ON FALL RELEASES BK II~K~ STRIK~ AGAIN: its's a good title to cover a II number of new releases, the group of sexand-violence f'dms now dominating the box office, like Body Double, Crimes of Passion, Terror in the Aisles, and biggest box-office hit of all, Arnold Schwarzenegger's new incarnation as The Terminator...
...Macchio, naturally, is given a friend marked for early doom, an epileptic whose taste for drugs is used for some false, contrived climaxes...
...Nolte also has some good moments reminiscing about ideals with friend and vice-principal, Judd Hirsch, whose haggard face, even through laughter, telegraphs just how soon he will sell out and make a separate peace with bureaucracy...
...Since this column last appeared, however, there have been several important openings: two major melodramas about farming, a surprisingly excellei~t comedy, and one disaster masquerading as social commentary...
...The society in which they live has the duty to provide those means, to which they have a right...
...He said: "The problem is not our lack of food...
...He had even stopped growing coffee...
...He said that he did not understand why the government forbade the transport of food, especially as some areas needed food very badly...
...These government officials pay the farmers a small fraction of the price the government gets when it sells the same product: to consumers, which in some cases means that the farmers are taxed 90 percent when selling their food...
...Consequently, they never considered tree leaves as a serious food resource...
...Bishop Sangu is the bishQp of Mbeya in Tanzania...
...There were further consequences...
...The bishop told me he had seen a truckdriver practically beaten to death because he was transporting a small bag of beans to his family in town...
...The parents of an ex-student bring suit against the Midwest school (named John F. Kennedy High, to conjure up some sixties ghosts) for passing the child despite his illiteracy...
...Because of it, the governII I THE REVEREND J.G...
...But a German Benedictine working in Tanzania did understand the reason for the prohibition...
...Farmers tried to import Western plants, fruits, and animals (including snails and shrimps), most times with the intention of exporting them back to the very countries from which the imported flora and fauna originally came...
...New foodstuffs, introduced from Europe, made African farmers dependent on Western markets for seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides...
...Nolte is saddled with a relationship with a beautiful ex-student who has become a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the illiteracy lawsuit...
...He has just returned from a working trip io Africa...
...Played by Jobeth Williams, the cute lawyer is given to repetitive, shrill preaching about the rights and wrongs of the case (even, we're supposed to believe, to her bigwig boss...
...But if that aid is given only in the form of food, it will only worsen the situation...
...The government buys a bag of maize for 11 Kwacha and sells it for 13 Kwacha...
...They are supposed to work with oxen...
...Though camels oaake human survival possible in marginal desert areas, there is scarcely an official camel market in Eastern Africa...
...He had just returned from a meeting in Kinshasa, Zaire, where bishops from all over Africa had been discussing justice and peace issues...
...As a result food production has been going down all over Africa in the last ten years, and food aid from outside helps only the towns...
...Kenya will never build necessary storage...
...He gave trees as an example...
...But each family has the duty to be self-reliant, once those means are provided...
...The Terminator is easy to classify and dismiss, but what do we do with Teachers...
...If you would not have too much, we wouldn't have too little...
...You are strangling us with your left hand, while you are feeding us with your right...
...The net result is that the farmers have stopped producing food crops...
...Would it not be wiser to do what India did about ten years ago in almost the same kind of circumstances...
...As long as this type of help is given, no local problems will be tackled...
...Such crops do not pay...
...T HE BISHOP was sitting opposite me...
...The film is a Mad magazine version of A Nation atRisk, but the only problem is that it's not funny...
...But the plot is saddled with too many other relationships and absurdities to make a serious, and finally even intelligible, statement about the problems of teaching or teachers...
...That is much more than the 10 percent a Tazanian farmer or the 15 percent a Kenyan farmer may receive for their products from their governments...
...But the town-dwellers are still importing their luxury cars...
...What we need, the Benedictine said, is a good farmers' union...
...It would be good if the world community would apply that traditional African idea of justice when helping that continent...
...Farmers are not allowed to import tractors...
...The world community should make it possible for Africa to take care of itself...
...And isn't that our final aim...
...Within a more traditional justice pattern such rights are considered quite differently...
...He added that he himself would not dare tO transport even a few pounds of beans...
...He laughed rather bitterly about the plans of the European Economic Community and the United States to send food in the form of wheat, corn, milkpowder, pasta, and tomato sauce...
...The same thing happened to practically all the indigenous vegetables, seeds, berries, and nuts...
...Former idealist, teacher Nick Nolte, reluctantly goes along with school board pressure to testify that the student was well-taught, and saves his remaining energies to prevent the automatic promotion of a new student, played by Ralph Macchio, who brings to his role of bored punk some winning, cocky freshness...
...Would it notbe better, they ask, to refuse the American and European cereal -- and milkpowder -- aid...
...This difference in price makes it possible for the urban elite, to survive, and even to enjoy the relative luxury of their life in town, driving cars and drinking beer...
...His coffee had been infested by a disease, and the insecticide, also imported from Europe, was so costly it priced his coffee out of the market...
...The fertilizer imported from Europe is now so expensive he can't sell his beans against the price of their production...
...In the traditional Gikuyu society in Kenya, for example, justice means that every family has the means to be able to be selfreliant...
...Wheat was dumped into the ocean...
...Aid has to be given to them...
...They contain sufficient food reserves for a whole year...
...Many of the action groups which favor food aid to Africa speak about the right each human being has to sufficient food and drink, a right that is most compelling in a world with a surplus of food...
...In one encounter, Nolte yells back at Williams, telling her she "doesn't have to walk naked through the school corridors every day" -- a signaling line that made me uneasy until, alas, my fears that it 30 November 1984:659...
...Westerners were not familiar with these animals, and tended to overlook their breeding...
...In Malawi the diet will grow further and further away from local food production...
...It could not do otherwise when hundreds of thousands of migrant workers returned from South Africa...
...the problem is your overproduction...
...The food problem in Africa is also to a great extent a cultural problem...
...You invented a beautiful way to transform vice into virtue...
...The immigrants had not been used to eating the leaves of trees...
...He spoke about the drought and the famine, and explained why he had stopped growing food long before the drought...
...He told me how Western colonizers introduced few traditional African foods in the formal food market...
...It seems to be the only country in Africa that concentrated on rural development after independence...
...Until very recently, money was not invested on the improvement of the indigenous animals and edible plants...
...This is probably the reason they have some of the best agricultural !and in the Commonweal: 658 United States today...
...That is the only type of help that will out-help help...
...The last perhaps, deserves the first comment, since it may do more harm than the more openly exploitative films now on view...
...Africans are starting to become more and more suspicious of Western assistance...
Vol. 111 • November 1984 • No. 21
