The United Nations has strained every sinew to emphasise the extent of Africa’s famine that has put 30-million people on the brink of starvation. Yet the countries able to assist are not writing the cheques.
Their resistance is largely owing to bad governance, which is one of the root causes of the shortage. Zimbabwe — with more than half its population going hungry — is the worst culprit.
Aid to the six-million Zimbabweans facing food emergencies threatened to dry up following the assertion by the Harare government that all food aid would have to be channeled through the authorities.
A memorandum of understanding signed between the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Zanu-FP government in mid-September has fortunately prevented this. The Zimbabwe government — frequently blamed for using emergency food as a political weapon — has been forced to accept that assistance will be passed through NGOs.
The WFP appealed for $530-million in July to save the 6,5-million people on the brink of starvation in six countries: Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan underpinned this appeal with the warning that the window of opportunity to help these people was closing. The amount being requested is less than half of what the United States has spent searching for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
The WFP appeal is split with $308-million going to buy food, and the rest to non-food items. The previous year — when 13-million people faced starvation in the six countries — donors met 85% of the food needs, but only a third of the non-food items.
South Africa’s Ministry of Agriculture and Land Affairs is currently considering what it will give to the WFP appeal. Last year South Africa donated R170-million worth of maize to countries in the region. No less than 100 000 tons of mielies were bought locally. They were milled and bagged before being transported to the recipients.
South African maize farmers did well out of the tribulations in the region. More than 400 000 tons of maize destined for the six famine countries were bought in South Africa. This had to be done in carefully planned tranches to avoid local shortages.
Chris Kaye of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said this week that donor countries were being regularly briefed on the humanitarian crisis. They agreed that humanitarian organisations were doing valuable work in the region, but “they are not writing the cheques. There is still grave concern over the food side, particularly over the WFP activities. The pipeline is good until the end of the year, but it doesn’t look healthy after that.”
Famine specialists said that failing a dramatic increase in donations supplies to Mozambique will dry up in December and to Zimbabwe the following month.
“There is also concern over the ‘non-food’ items and support is needed for the provision of social services, education and health care, and for the critical needs associated with the effect of HIV/Aids on households and communities,” said Kaye.
HIV/Aids is compounded by the famine with the disease progressing much faster in conditions of poor nutrition.
As more and more economically active people become ill, the young and the aged are left to fend for themselves. Education and health services are breaking down as professionals either get ill or quit to seek less traumatic working conditions. The economic development of the region is being undermined by the epidemic. The greatest immediate need, said specialists, is to get food to the more than three-million Aids orphans in the region and to woman-headed families who are largely spurned by communities.
Earlier this month WFP executive director James Morris said only 20% of the required funds had come in.
Morris, who is Annan’s special envoy for humanitarian needs in Southern Africa, said pledges from Australia, Sweden and the Netherlands, however welcome, were not enough.
He warned that the gains made last year could be “very quickly reversed. The cheque is not in the post. We are deciding whether to get on to planes and go and knock on doors,” said Morris.