Can Africa Conquer Famine?
Waal, Alex de & Duffield, Mark
The Political Sources of Disaster We [the Dinka] do not just starve; someone has to force starvation upon us. —A woman displaced from Southern Sudan, April 1986 Indeed, in the terrible history...
...Garrison-based relief centers are often the site of flagrant abuses such as the diversion of food aid to militia forces or the use of food distributions as a "bait" to lure villagers for involuntary relocation...
...Finally, the present system of nation-state sovereignty means that only one side in a civil war, namely the recognized government, is eligible for relief from the U.N...
...the remainder was provided by the "victims' " own efforts...
...A huge swath of Dinka countryside was burned, and 392 • DISSENT African Famine whole herds of cattle stolen...
...If humanitarian agencies and Western donors refuse to play politics, tyrants such as Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopia are more than happy to take advantage of this naivet...
...However, there is the prospect of new types of famine...
...Financing cattle raiding is a logical enterprise for a livestock merchant in a capricious market...
...Political changes that are sweeping away authoritarian governments give cause for optimism, but other trends on the continent, toward the development of deeply divided and militarized 390 • DISSENT African Famine societies, suggest that African famine will not be conquered soon...
...It has only one battle cry: mass starvation is imminent and Western charity is urgently needed...
...This is a concession to the domestic politics of aid: government donations to humanitarian organizations receive good publicity...
...Despite the fact that most famine victims were beyond the reach of government-based distribution programs in 1985, the government and agencies working alongside it received 90 percent of the resources...
...The tragedies of Sudan must remain in mind as an object lesson of the failures that may accompany political pluralism...
...In most cases, lip service to concepts currently fashionable in the aid community is all that is required to keep the aid flowing...
...In countries such as Ethiopia and Mozambique, relief agencies have found themselves playing a strategic military role, helping a government army to secure contested areas...
...economic support (all because of the government's support for Iraq) led to a crisis of confidence in the Sudanese pound...
...The Sudanese famine of 1986-88 has yet more ironies in store...
...This is, of course, an extreme example of the inadvertent propping up of a heinous regime from the best humanitarian motives...
...One reason is that prevention programs need to be triggered...
...It does not explain why the poor are suffering famine...
...The losers are impoverished and unable to reestablish themselves by peaceable means...
...The donor-recipient relationship is changing, but the fundamentals have yet to be altered...
...Though the poverty is real, the statistics are misleading, because they fail to capture a range of significant economic activities...
...Famines of Drought and Neglect A simple but widely held belief is that drought leads to production failures, which in turn lead to famine...
...While the official economy crashed and the official external debt rose to $14 billion, private citizens prospered...
...Most deaths are caused by epidemic disease, either acting in concert with undernutrition or—more often—simply carrying away the hungry and well-nourished alike...
...Food aid stood neglected for two years in railway sidings, while less than a mile away the people for whom it was intended starved to death...
...These bring benefits to rebel movements, but not on the same scale as governments...
...The middle classes rushed to convert their currency into foreign exchange or into essential items such as food...
...In a famine, animal prices fall...
...Small wonder that governments are more responsive to their paymasters than to their electorates...
...This is part of a wider phenomenon, which is the militarization of African societies...
...Over the past century, the Indian government has developed a sophisticated famine prevention system, in the form of the colonial "famine codes" and modern "scarcity manuals...
...Botswana and Cape Verde are two African countries that have implemented similar famine-prevention systems, which have met with remarkable success despite food shortfalls that are, relatively speaking, far greater than those in Ethiopia or Sudan...
...First, journalists and editors must be well informed and responsible...
...Second, the free press must be accompanied by wider civil and political freedoms...
...Former Soviet clients have been required to seek peace, and governments supported by the United States and France have found themselves without a patron prepared to indulge their autocratic ways...
...Prompt action by the state to provide guaranteed employment, to control the market price of food, and to provide free relief to the most vulnerable (such as the old and infirm) can prevent any undue distress...
...The single greatest restriction comes with loss of land...
...Predatory forms of commerce, driven by shrinking markets and in turn causing impoverishment and famine, are also becoming common...
...those working on the rebel side received 10 percent...
...More important, the channels of communication also act as the trigger...
...If civil action and protest are illegal, press coverage of impending famine will not galvanize a government to action...
...Moreover, the system transfers accountability from the people (who would be ready to call their government to account) to the donors (who are reluctant to impose conditions...
...ability to acquire licenses, permits, and exceptions...
...The second is that famine is often created deliberately...
...The acute ethical dilemma of whether to continue under such circumstances or to place human rights conditions on humanitarian aid has rarely been faced...
...Local warfare over wells, pasture, and arable land has long been a feature of rural Africa, sharpened recently because of the shrinkage of the natural resource base caused by ecological degradation...
...There is an important germ of truth in this: repeated rainfall failure, combined with a chronic decline in soil productivity, undoubtedly played a role in famines such as that which struck the west African Sahel in 1970-73 and again in 1983-85...
...ery, infamy and war," but only one of the forty newspapers and journals published in the capital reported on an incident in April 1988, when a trainload of six thousand famine victims arrived at Khartoum Central railroad station, whereupon six children died on the platform...
...By utilizing voluntary agencies, the donor loses much of its potential leverage...
...Starvation is frequently unknown...
...The truism that "a starving child knows no politics" is equated with the manifestly false statement that blindness to political realities is a precondition for feeding that child...
...Peace and political accountability would consign such famines to history...
...agencies and most bilateral donors...
...The Western donors' new flexibility does not necessarily entail an even-handed humanitarianism, but may instead lead to a more inflexible enforcement of Western economic and political fashions...
...One of the commonest types of relief program is the feeding of people forcibly displaced by military action...
...This means that even if military commanders do not intend to create famine, that is often the result of their actions...
...One is the reshuffling that has accompanied the ending of the cold war...
...The United States' cold-war search for client states has turned into a scramble by African governments to find Western patrons...
...During the Raj, the Indian famine codes SUMMER • 1992 • 391 African Famine included a complex "intelligence system...
...If the member of parliament fails to act, he or she will be certain to lose popular support—by being subjected to immediate ridicule in the media and loss of votes at the next election...
...Amartya Sen* oth these statements are true, and yet there is a terrible irony in them...
...The rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) drew its support primarily from the Dinka ethnic group...
...These wars have created a different kind of famine, characterized by mass movements of people in extreme distress and with little purpose...
...Through aid, the people of an African country surrender a crucial element in their sovereignty: the accountability of government to its taxpayers...
...However, for four decades there has been no need for such technological sophistication in India, because the same task is performed by the press and the parliamentary system...
...In Africa today these indicators are supplemented by satellite imagery and computer models and called "early warning systems," and Western donors lavish millions of dollars on them...
...The murderous power of modern firearms allows conflicts that previously had a limited impact to escalate into large-scale massacres...
...Threats can be a highly effective weapon, but they are used rarely and very reluctantly, and never when there is media attention to starving children...
...Feeding Wars Western humanitarian agencies are often enrolled as unwitting partners in the military strategy of "starvation or submission...
...Such "survival strategies" contribute far more to survival than does food relief...
...One reason is that the internationalization of responsibility for famine relief has developed together with a depoliticized portrayal of famine by the Western media and relief agencies...
...Both capitalist and state "socialist" governments have been criticized for following policies that increase rural poverty...
...wealth in livestock...
...The liquidity of central banks, the payment of officials' salaries, even the survival of regimes, has long depended on the continued flow of concessionary finance...
...396 • DISSENT...
...One is that they are fought in fragile rural economies, without adequate assistance given to the dislocated population...
...The "new conditionality" of the Western donors, involving an explicit commitment to democracy and human rights, along with the greater post-Kurdistan willingness of the UN to intervene in cases of contested sovereignty, indicates the possibility of transforming these damaging relationships...
...If the 394 • DISSENT African Famine elite's monopoly of these is threatened, their rapid adjustments spells disaster for the poor...
...Even Sudan, which has broken most of the rules by repeatedly defaulting on its debts and supporting Saddam Hussein in the bargain, still receives massive foreign aid...
...The rich may succeed in coping with future economic shocks, but only by making the poor bear the brunt of them...
...Ethiopia is the classic example...
...there is no evidence to show that during the peak period of hunger, there were any additional deaths at all compared to normal...
...The significant exceptions occur when voluntary agencies insist on more accountability than the donors have demanded...
...This did not happen: in fact, according to such indicators as sales of gasoline, the economy was prospering...
...Indian farmers are able to alert the government to impending scarcity through the press and the local member of parliament more rapidly than any technologically based system...
...the common theme is struggle for control of state power...
...There are three elements that will be important in shaping future famines: SUMMER • 1992 • 393 African Famine militarization, "hidden" economies, and the changing role of Western intervention...
...They tend to diversify as much as possible, growing different crops, herding animals, and following other activities to earn money in the slack season...
...The Dinka woman, driven from her home by the savage raids of Sudanese Arab militiamen, was, that very same month, entitled to vote in the first free multi-party elections in her country in eighteen years...
...A woman displaced from Southern Sudan, April 1986 Indeed, in the terrible history of famines in the world, it is hard to find a case in which a famine has occurred in a country with a free press and an active opposition within a democratic system...
...The international system of emergency aid almost always reinforces the authority of those entities called "sovereign states...
...the smuggling of ivory, gems and arms...
...Following these strategies unobstructed, rural people are remarkably effective in avoiding destitution and starvation...
...These programs are typically smaller than those in government-held areas and more liable to interruption...
...This is now less common...
...In each year from 1980 to 1983, there were harvest surpluses in certain parts of northern Ethiopia, but army offensives into areas held by the rebel Tigrayan People's Liberation Front destroyed much...
...Voluntary agencies have their own agenda, which usually involves arguing for more aid, and often they are willing to make significant compromises in order to continue their own programs in a country...
...In the four decades since independence, India has succeeded in preventing a succession of major harvest failures from developing into famines by the use of such interventions...
...Combined with a fear of an imminent harvest failure, the result was a six-fold increase in the price of basic grains, causing instant famine among the poor...
...Thus severe famine developed in the first months of 1983, although widespread drought was not to strike until six months later...
...Media everywhere are prone to exaggeration and simplification...
...The Sahelian famine of the early 1970s is the classic example of this...
...Simultaneously, an upsurge in popular discontent at single-party and military regimes has led to widespread concessions of civil and political liberties...
...the owners sell cheap and middlemen and merchants gain by transporting the animals to regions where prices are high or else keeping them for the price rebound when the famine abates...
...Some of the governments have been avowedly socialist (Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola) and others capitalist (Sudan, Somalia, Liberia...
...These included remittances from Somalis working abroad...
...But all have three things in common...
...Donors also support relief operations in rebel-controlled areas...
...There was no drought, and the Nile floods of 1988 caused little agricultural damage...
...In one camp, el Meiram, during the summer of 1988, death rates averaged 1 percent per day...
...in this case rural famine will coexist with a vigorous unofficial economy, and quite possibly with a pluralist political system...
...and ownership of modern firearms...
...Ethnically based irregular armies are the basis for the warlordism of Chadian politics...
...Since the embarrassment suffered by Western governments during Christmas 1984, when they were caught without an excuse for having failed to provide adequate relief to Ethiopia during the previous two years, Western politicians will never refuse to advocate more humanitarian aid to Africa...
...These activities are generally the "coping strategies" of the rich, and exist in a vibrant unmeasured economy...
...Transitions Two related and hopeful trends in contemporary African politics promise to have a profound impact on famine prevention...
...Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and many children dragged off into slavery...
...SUMMER • 1992 • 395 African Famine Donors potentially have enormous leverage, through threats to cut off aid...
...These relations can become crystallized into assetstripping practices, oiled by the threat or exercise of violence, that impoverish the many to the advantage of the few...
...Tight restrictions in contested areas made it impossible for anyone to migrate to find work or for small merchants to trade food to needy areas, while the aerial bombardment of markets in rebelheld areas brought commerce to a halt there, too...
...district officers monitored rainfall food prices and other "premonitory signs and symptoms of distress...
...Thus unpopular African governments retain an extraordinary freedom of action...
...Preventing Drought Famines A final point about drought famines is that they are remarkably easy for a government to prevent...
...It is quite possible that the passing of cold-warsponsored authoritarian regimes will merely mean that we are faced with a new kind of African famine...
...Even when governments have good reason for withholding humanitarian aid or attaching strict conditions to it, their representatives shy away from admitting that they are "playing politics...
...Whole populations can therefore fall outside the reach of large-scale international aid...
...Overall, Sudan is therefore not a debtor nation at all, and if unrecorded incomes are counted it is probably a middle-income country...
...The resources that are being fought over are the very fundamentals of rural life...
...This explains why the richer suburbs of Khartoum are filled with houses that would not be out of place in Riyadh...
...The Dinka did not starve—they were starved...
...Third, famine must be a political issue...
...Western Interventions Increasingly, an explicitly humanitarian agenda informs Western policy towards Africa...
...However, caution is in order...
...Military strategists often plan their counterinsurgency campaigns knowing that relief supplies will be provided for displaced civilians, and that the presence of relief agencies will dispel accusations of deliberate starvation...
...The press plays two roles: it provides information and it brings political pressure to bear...
...This does not refute Professor Sen's point...
...But while intense agrarian crisis has on occasion caused famine, such famines are usually mild and cause relatively few deaths...
...There, the displaced people were robbed and prevented from gathering wild foods while the army garrisons held up internationally donated food relief...
...The survivors were forced to go to local garrison towns for sustenance, and from there north to where work and charity might be available—right through the militias' territory...
...The winner of the elections, the Umma party headed by Prime Minister Sadiq el Mandi, then proceeded to give further arms to the Arab militias...
...This follows from the high profile given to famine relief in the media, and the continent's economic decline, with a commensurate decrease in investment and development aid...
...the government armed neighboring groups and encouraged them to attack Dinka villages...
...However, the expanding sectors of the economy were largely unmeasured...
...Government policies of land expropriation and restriction of movement have contributed to numerous famines in Africa whose immediate cause appears to be drought...
...Most African governments know that the flow of humanitarian aid will continue unabated because of the domestic politics of the donor countries...
...Relief agencies are obliged to turn a blind eye to these abuses if they wish to be allowed to continue their programs...
...When a country is divided by a civil war, especially when that division has racial and religious dimensions, the domain of the free press and parliamentary opposition is greatly restricted...
...These economic activities were largely controlled by rich people with access to government office...
...Had there not been a constant inflow of new migrants, the camp would simply have become a graveyard...
...In fact, in the majority of cases, starvation is unlikely and massive international food relief is far from the best response...
...Thus, a vigorous pluralist civil society in the capital coexisted with rural violence, civil war, and resulting famine...
...Policy failures have combined with climatic vicissitudes and ecological degradation to create Africa's agrarian crisis...
...In northern Ethiopia in the early 1980s, a combination of these strategies was instrumental in creating famine...
...The victor will be anxious to ensure that the vanquished do not have the ability to reorganize and strike back, and may therefore wreak destruction on villages and herds beyond what is required to gain control of the disputed resources...
...The ending of civil wars and the transition to more democratic politics would appear to remove the two main obstacles to preventing famine...
...But Western aid budgets have a disproportionate importance for recipient governments throughout the continent...
...Access to modern firearms is cheap and unregulated...
...War Famines War has been the most important cause of famine in Africa in the last ten years, usually fought by authoritarian governments against rural insurgents...
...While providing the last 10 percent to the victims the aid provided rather more to the government that was the main cause of their suffering...
...Vulnerability to famine is, to a large extent, a result of the stripping away of these options...
...They are certainly giant strides in the right direction, but caution is in order...
...If the means of famine prevention are so well known, why do famines remain so common...
...Humanitarian agencies' initiatives in drawing attention to the famine in southern Sudan, and the government's role in it, is a noteworthy example...
...In Sudan, the late 1980s did see a descent into famine...
...The Sudanese government used a different military strategy after the outbreak of the war in the south in 1983...
...For relief aid, most donors demand only a minimum of accountability...
...Outright starvation became common and death rates reached levels sixty times as high as those recorded in the same area during the drought-famine of 1984-85...
...Yet, throughout this period, there was an uncensored press in Khartoum and fierce debates in the constituent assembly...
...Militarization There is a third trend in contemporary Africa, manifest in Liberia and Somalia: toward chaos...
...Such violence can coexist with pluralist elected governments, and may indeed be fueled by them...
...In Sudan, the government has manipulated local conflicts and used ethnicallybased militias as a strategy in a wider civil war...
...Not only have these refugees lost their homes, they have lost that remnant of control over their lives that is so critical to the success of "survival strategies" in peacetime famines...
...What looks like a humanitarian feeding center to a foreign agency may be the center of a pacification campaign to an army commander and a concentration camp to a local villager...
...Overnight, a resourceful farmer-herder-gatherer may be reduced to a laborer...
...and the diversion of foreign aid...
...The array of methods includes military offensives against rebel strongholds, relocation of the population, restrictions on movement and trade, and sponsorship of local groups hostile to the insurgents...
...Variations on these forms of warfare have been found in Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, Uganda, and Mali...
...Two years later, the cumulative effect of their raids on the Dinka population was to create famine of a severity unequaled in the modern world...
...If Western aid donors maintain their present relationship with African governments, they will not only give disproportionate assistance to those governments relative to suffering people, but will depoliticize famine, and hence help to perpetuate it...
...Its true impact is very rarely assessed—the commissions of inquiry that follow every food emergency in India are never to be found in Africa...
...New Types of Famine In the future, the absence of civil wars sponsored by cold-war rivalry is likely to see fewer counterinsurgency famines, and the transition to greater pluralism will create governments more responsive to popular pressure to ameliorate famine...
...When donors speak of a "sovereign country," they mean a sovereign government...
...but similar "coping strategies" cushioned the rich...
...The huge relief operation for the drought-famine of 1984-5 in western Sudan provided, on average, no more than 10 percent of the diet of famine-stricken villagers...
...Smallholder farmers and pastoralists are economically astute and "risk averse...
...In these famines, many fewer people die than media accounts and United Nations estimates would have us believe, and only a small minority of those deaths are brought on by starvation...
...Meanwhile, relief became the government's largest source of foreign currency, the artificially high exchange rate enabled the government to levy a tax of at least 50 percent on all currency transactions for famine relief programs, and the "acceptable" rate of food aid diversion of 5 percent allowed the military establishment to be fed...
...There is a bleak but quite possible scenario under which the ruling elites of Africa may be integrated into the Western economies through their ownership of capital while the poor are equally integrated—through being perpetual recipients of international famine relief...
...Historically, official inaction over famine has contributed to the fall of governments...
...In addition, they are often considered above criticism by the media...
...While this system continues, African governments will have an inherent tendency towards authoritarianism, for the simple reason that an authoritarian ruler who avoids offending the donors too much will be able to get away with it...
...Socialist governments have been castigated for promoting collectivization and restricting private trade...
...Climatic adversity, poverty, and ecological degradation will leave people vulnerable to famine, as will local violence, either manipulated by governments or simply allowed to grow uncontrollably...
...Western media coverage of famines is both more extreme and more simplified than in India...
...Civilians on the "other side" do not qualify for the rights of citizens...
...Africa's "Hidden" Economies Many accounts of the food crisis in Africa are introduced with a litany of dismal statistics about the economic decline of the continent...
...Most important, however, rebel movements do not control currency rates and rarely transact the exchanges themselves, and so never obtain tax revenue and only occasionally foreign exchange from the programs...
...This trend often makes relief aid less accountable...
...During this period about $10 billion was exported in unrecorded capital flight, and a similar amount was invested abroad by Sudanese expatriates...
...African military strategists have learned that one of the most effective weapons in their arsenal is starvation, which is more commonly used to force people to submit than to kill them...
...There are two basic patterns of famine in Africa, one characterized by drought and neglect, and the other by government counterinsurgency measures against rural insurrections...
...capitalist governments for turning over smallholdings and pasture to commercial plantations and for promoting cash crops and migrant labor at the expense of food production...
...This belief is often combined with analyses that lay blame on overpopulation, ecological imbalances, inappropriate development policies, or impoverishment by colonialism and neocolonialism...
...These militias became intoxicated with plunder and racial hatred and carried the attacks through with near-genocidal ferocity...
...In doing so they may be providing a 10 percent contribution to rural people's survival, but they are also abetting the destruction of much of the other 90 percent...
...Such famines are so mild because rural people in drought-prone areas have developed strategies to cope with the stresses of drought, which include time-honored activities such as gathering wild fruits and grass seeds and more recently adopted ones such as migrating to towns and richer rural areas in search of paid employment...
...This was leading to a situation in which political parties were arming partisan militias as a safeguard against their rivals' seizing absolute power...
...During Mengistu's fourteen-year rule, as he steered his country into a series of disasters of extraordinary proportions, Western aid rose tenfold...
...Newspaper editorials warned the prime minister that he would be remembered by history for "treach* Amartya Sen, "Individual Freedom as a Social Commitment," New York Review of Books, June 14, 1990, p. 50...
...Losing a local war is tantamount to suffering famine...
...Delegates concerned with human rights objected to provisions in a draft Islamic penal code that mandated amputation of the hand for theft and discriminated against women, but none raised the issue of famine...
...Local conflicts interact with national politics in a variety of ways...
...Increasingly, donors are switching to large voluntary organizations to implement their aid programs...
...The link between a free press and famine prevention is now widely recognized...
...The important thing is that money for relief be spent...
...Three factors provide the key to the successful adjustment of the rich to Africa's economic crisis: access to foreign exchange...
...The best example is the livestock market...
...A common pattern of conflict centers on competition for resources...
...For example, in Sudan in August 1990, the fear of a simultaneous cut-off in remittances from the Gulf and withdrawal of Saudi and U.S...
...This involvement has altered the relationship of African governments to their citizens and to their overseas donors...
...Faced with rural insurgencies, African governments resort to classic counter-insurgency strategies with a high level of indiscriminate brutality...
...However, there are three prerequisites...
...During the late 1980s, Somalia's per capita GNP plummeted to such a level that economic analyses predicted mass starvation...
...The famine period and its aftermath allowed the army to make important territorial gains in the north...
...During that year the government authorized the export of 250,000 tons of grain—exactly one ton for each person estimated to have perished from famine...
Vol. 39 • July 1992 • No. 3
