The world is in a ”race against the clock” to avert the looming famine in Southern Africa, says Jacques Diouf, chief of the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Speaking at the end of the World Food Summit held in Rome in June this year, he urged member states to work ”in the interests of all, rich and poor, to bring into being a more equitable world”.
Crop failure and drought have put 13-million people across Southern Africa at risk of extreme food shortages and starvation.
However, aid agencies say that weather has little to do with famine. A country’s failure to produce its own food shouldn’t mean that it falls into famine.
Leon Louw, executive director of the Free Market Foundation, dismisses the effects of poor climate and crop failure. He says governments are solely to blame for food crises.
When governments don’t set up infrastructure and plans to meet emergencies, the effects of the weather can take hold.
Zimbabwe’s government has been telling the country there is no food shortage and it is not preparing itself for a famine, though the Food and Agriculture Organisation warns that by the end of the year more than half the population will need food aid.
In Malawi the government controversially sold off reserve stocks of maize after receiving advice from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The IMF says it advised Malawi’s government to sell two-thirds of the stock. Malawi is now ill-prepared for the food shortage that is hitting the country, and the proceeds of the sale have vanished.
International trade compounds the problems that arise from bad economic decisions. The United States, Europe and Japan together spend $350-billion on agricultural subsidies each year that effectively lower the price of food commodities.
Mark Malloch Brown, head of the United Nations Development Programme, estimates that farm subsidies cost developing countries about $50-billion a year in lost agricultural exports.
”Subsidies are crippling Africa’s chance to export its way out of poverty,” James Wolfensohn, the World Bank’s president, said last month.
South Africa is unlikely to be as affected by famine as its neighbours because it does not depend as much as they do on domestic agriculture. Even if crops fail in certain regions, South Africa can alleviate the shortage domestically and has the foreign exchange to import needed food.
But Louw argues the African National Congress’s intention to reintroduce state regulation on agricultural commodities, including fixing crop prices, will make South Africa more vulnerable to food crises.