Worsening
Food Insecurity In Africa
By Barry Mason
07 September 2006
World
Socialist Web
A
report by the development charity Oxfam, “Causing Hunger: An Overview
of the Food Crisis in Africa,” finds that the food crisis in Africa
is continuing to worsen. In the 1960s Oxfam provided part of the impetus
to set up the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation’s
(FAO) Freedom from Hunger Campaign, aimed at reducing food insecurity.
That campaign has failed miserably in Africa.
According to the Oxfam report,
whilst the average “developing world” figure for under-nourishment
is 17 percent, in sub-Saharan Africa the figure is 33 percent. For Central
Africa it is 55 percent. On average the number of African food emergencies
per year since the mid 1980s has tripled.
The report acknowledges that
the situation is not going to improve. It states, “Another failure
is on the horizon. The commitment ... to halve hunger by 2015, as part
of the Millennium Development Goals, will not be met by in Africa at
current rates of progress.”
The central reason why the
situation has not improved, according to Oxfam, is the major powers’
failure to respond speedily and appropriately to the emergency food
situations. Citing Niger as an example, the report observes, “Although
the earliest warnings came in late 2004, it was only when pictures of
suffering children were shown on television in June 2005 that the international
community was galvanised into action. By the time aid arrived, 3.6 million
people were suffering from hunger.”
It is a regular occurrence
that emergency financial appeals by bodies such as the United Nations
get a slow and partial response. “Most UN emergency appeals receive
only 30 percent of the requested funds in their first month,”
explains the report.
For example, earlier this
year the UN launched the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) so that
the response to future emergencies could be immediate—under the
previous setup, the funds had to be collected before any action could
be taken. The UN suggested that $500 million was needed, but Oxfam agues
this figure should be at least $1 billion. According to a recent UN
news report, the fund has raised just over $260 million.
The Oxfam report notes, “The
UN estimates that 16 million people are at immediate risk in ten neglected
and under-funded emergencies in Africa, which include the prolonged
tragedies of northern Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
Most of the aid provided
to Africa is given as food, and related non-food needs are generally
not met. It can take four to five months for food to be delivered. While
purchasing food locally would be a cheaper and more efficient method
of giving aid, the governments of donor countries have their own reasons
for shipping food instead: “For some donor countries it has been
a useful way of offloading their own agricultural surpluses and providing
commercial benefits to their own agricultural and shipping companies:
79 percent of total food aid is sourced in donor countries. In the case
of rice and wheat, for example, the buying up of food stocks for use
as foreign aid is a form of domestic subsidy, and can actively harm
farmers in the developing world.”
Increasing poverty is a key
factor in the hunger crisis—in some food crises food may be available
but is simply unaffordable. Since 1981 the number of those living on
less than a $1 a day in sub-Saharan Africa has increased twofold to
over 310 million people. A food crisis which emerged in the northeast
of Kenya in 2005 particularly affected pastoralist peoples. While the
country saw a 15 percent increase in the harvest yield and a 5 percent
rise in GDP, the proportion of the population living on less than $1
a day had risen to 66 percent, up from 40 percent in 1990.
Over the last two decades
sub-Saharan Africa has had “inadequate debt cancellation, declining
and poor quality development aid, flawed advice from donors, conditions
attached to aid that forced countries to adopt damaging agricultural
policies, and unfair trade rules . . ”
The report finds that the
root cause of Africa’s ongoing food insecurity is the lack of
investment in agricultural production. Sub-Saharan Africa has a predominantly
rural economy, with 70 percent of the population living in rural areas
and providing the livelihoods of two-thirds of the population. Whilst
immediate food aid from the West has been increasing, aid for agricultural
production in sub-Saharan Africa dropped by 43 percent in the 1990s.
According to the New Partnership
for African Development (NEPAD), it would require an investment of $18
billion a year into the rural infrastructure to achieve the World Food
Summit goal to cut hunger by 50 percent. Much of African agriculture
remains rain-fed only, and those irrigation schemes that do exist are
concentrated in large commercial agribusiness estates.
Another major factor in the
food crisis is the continuing AIDS epidemic, which interacts with food
insecurity giving rise to so-called “new variant famine.”
The sub-Saharan region has 26 million people living with the virus and
this led to nearly 2.5 million deaths in 2005.
A vicious circle has been
established as the disease hits young adults who work on the land. “Death
prevents parents passing on vital agricultural or other skills to their
children,” the report notes. “Those ill from the disease
are debilitated, reducing their ability to tend the land and so leading
to food insecurity which in turn exacerbates the symptoms of the disease.”
“Maize production on
communal farms fell by 54 percent between 1992 and 1997, largely because
of AIDS-related illness and death,” Oxfam explains.
In spite of the devastating
effects of the disease, the response from the major powers has been
minimal “Only one in every ten Africans needing AIDS medicines
was receiving them in 2005. It will cost at least $55 billion over the
next three years to provide prevention, treatment and care.... Donors
must dramatically increase their financial assistance.”
The report also found that
international trading polices had a substantially negative effect on
the African continent. “Rural poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is
exacerbated by dependence on the export of a small number of agricultural
commodities, many of which face volatile and falling world prices. In
2002-2003 .. a collapse in coffee prices contributed to the Ethiopian
food crisis that same year.”
Development charities such
as Oxfam generally believe that “fair trade” policies are
a way to tackle poverty in the undeveloped countries. This featured
heavily in the Make Poverty History campaign around the Gleneagles G8
summit held last year in Britain. The recent collapse of the Doha round
of World Trade talks, however, means that “fair trade” is
no longer even formally on the agendas of the world’s major powers.
Another factor exacerbating
the crisis of food production on the African continent is global climate
change. Research carried out by the British government’s International
Development Department on the effects of climate change in Africa predicts
that by the year 2050 there will be severe changes in southern Africa,
the Sahel, Great Lakes, and the coastal strips of west and east Africa.
The department’s chief
scientific advisor, Gordon Conway, was quoted by the Independent: “It
is a phenomenon that occurs in a world that is already challenged. This
is especially true of Africa where the existence of widespread poverty,
hunger and poor health already affect millions of people. All prognostications
suggest climate change will make their lives even worse.”
According to the Oxfam report
a temperature increase of 2.5 degrees centigrade by 2080 will put an
estimated 60 million additional people in Africa at risk of hunger.
A higher rise would put 80 million at risk. A separate report by Christian
Aid estimates that climate change in Africa could lead to a further
185 million deaths from disease by the end of the century.
The Oxfam report ends with
an appeal to the major powers to commit greater emergency assistance
more rapidly, to purchase food locally, and to secure more long-term
aid for agricultural investment. However, as Oxfam itself demonstrated
in a recent report on last year’s Gleneagles G8 summit, most of
the promises made by Western governments failed to materialize. Their
current appeal will also fall on deaf ears.