double standards: the war on iraq and Africa
We are all seized with the war in Iraq. On the humanitarian side, the World Food Programme has launched what may become the largest single humanitarian operation in history -- a massive intervention covering logistics, food and communications totaling $1.3 billion over six months. Reports vary on how much food Iraq's 27 million people now have. Earlier, the Iraqi Government announced that several months worth of food had been distributed, while our own national staff that has monitored the Oil for Food Program for the last decade put the figure at about a month's supply for the average family. We are all deeply concerned.
But as we meet today, there are nearly 40 million Africans in greater peril. They are struggling against starvation -- and, I can assure you, these 40 million Africans, most of them women and children, would find it an immeasurable blessing to have a month's worth of food. As much as I don't like it, I cannot escape the thought that we have a double standard. How is it we routinely accept a level of suffering and hopelessness in Africa we would never accept in any other part of the world? We simply cannot let this stand.
Commitments to humanitarian aid are political choices and this Council is the most important political forum in the world. There is so much each of you can do to focus the attention and resources on the food crises now engulfing much of sub-Saharan Africa. We must never again witness a famine of the proportions seen in Ethiopia in 1984/85. Up to 1 million people died in that famine -- losses far greater than most wars. Ironically, much of the assistance that might have saved them simply arrived too late -- thousands of tons of food were unloaded just as Ethiopian families were burying their dead.
The causes of Africa's food crises remain as I described them in December - a lethal combination of recurring droughts, failed economic policies, civil war, and the widening impact of AIDS, which has damaged the food sector and the capacity of governments to respond to need. The scale of the suffering is unprecedented. The World Food Programme must somehow find $1.8 billion this year just to meet emergency food needs in Africa. That is equal to all the resources we were able to gather last year for our projects worldwide and more than the biennial budget of the UN Secretariat here in New York.
Thus far, we remain nearly $1 billion short.
Continuing funding shortfalls for food emergencies in the DPRK and Afghanistan and future demands in Iraq further darken the outlook for Africa. Last year, global food aid continued to plummet, dipping below 10 million metric tons -- down from 15 million in 1999. My colleagues at FAO have found that chronic hunger is actually rising in the developing world outside China and the World Health Organization announced that hunger remains the world's number one threat to health.
Until recently it seemed that our appeals for help were just not getting through. But I have some encouraging news. First, the Secretary General has made the issue of African hunger -- especially as it relates to AIDS -- very much his own and that has energized and encouraged all of us. Second, France and the United States are working together to put African food crises on the agenda of the upcoming G8 meeting to be hosted by President Chirac in Evian in June. President Bush has announced the creation of a new $200 million fund to prevent famine and we hope that will be a down payment on a broader political commitment by the G8 and others to address food emergencies in Africa.
I will return to the G8 meeting a little later on and share some of our thinking on the kinds of commitments needed to deal better with food crises. But first I would like to share some information on my recent trip to southern Africa as the Secretary General's Special Envoy and our outlook on the current food security situation in Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Sahel and West Africa. The largest single threat to Africa's food security remains drought in a continent where irrigation is rare, but AIDS, failed economic policies and political violence also have major roles in different regions.
Southern Africa In southern Africa, and to a lesser degree in the Horn of Africa, the impact of AIDS on the political and economic structure grows daily. In January, I returned to the region along with Stephen Lewis, who is the Secretary General's Special Envoy on AIDS in Africa. We were struck by the impact the disease was having on both governance and the food sector, and how the two were intertwined. Much of Africa's political and technical talent is dying or emigrating, a huge depletion of Africa's human resources. Mr. Lewis often recounts how one Minister of Agriculture met recently with a delegation of nearly a dozen representatives of the European Union. The Minister arrived at the meeting alone, explaining to the delegation that all his immediate staff was either ill or already lost to AIDS. Out in rural villages, lands lie fallow because there is no one to farm them and more than 7 million African farmers have lost their lives to AIDS.
It is not hard to imagine where all of this is heading. The peak impact of the AIDS pandemic has not yet arrived in southern Africa and is not expected until 2005-2007. Political structures at the national level in the worst affected countries may gradually just fade away and, along with them, the services and social order they were intended to provide. Many of these governments grew out of the artificial political demarcations left by colonial powers and as political cohesion loosens, the potential for civil conflicts along the lines of those we see today in the Congo and Cote d'Ivoire grow more likely.
Even if governments succeed in maintaining a fair degree of central control and political cohesion, basic services and their economies are bound to suffer. How do you turn around food production in a country that no longer has a viable agricultural extension service? How do rural children learn to farm when their parents are too sick to teach them? How do you maintain a basic educational system for children when their teachers are dying faster than new ones can be trained? President Mwanawasa of Zambia told me that they were losing 2000 teachers a year to AIDS and were able to train only
1000 a year to replace them.
Yet there are some encouraging developments as well. The latest nutritional survey by our colleagues at UNICEF show that we have been able to block a rise in malnutrition among children under five. Thus far, more than 620,000 tons of emergency food has been distributed to more than 10 million people in the region. Donors have been very generous, especially the United States, European Union, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
The GM food issue has faded and is no longer delaying and disrupting deliveries. Five of the six countries needing aid in southern Africa are accepting processed and milled GM foods. We simply could not have reached the level of food deliveries we have now attained without the constructive problem solving undertaken.
But it would be foolish to say this crisis is over. Crop prospects are better, but more droughts are forecast and we are confronted with the real possibility of a permanent, low-grade food crisis created by AIDS. Women and girls are especially hard-hit by the disease, accounting for 60 percent of the cases and in Africa eight out of ten farmers are women. The impact is obvious. Right now all the UN agencies who have been involved in this humanitarian effort -- UNICEF, FAO, WHO, OCHA, UNDP and WFP -- are working on both short and long term strategies to address the impact of this pandemic on issues like governance, social services, and the food economy.
WFP remains especially concerned about Zimbabwe where there have been numerous media reports that food assistance is being politicized. We are confident that this is not the case for our food and in the few instances where we have received credible reports of abuse we suspended those operations, I have met with President Mugabe a number of times and we have offered the services of the UN to monitor and verify the food being distributed by the government there, but have not yet received a positive response. Inflation, government monopolization of the food sector and the impact of the land redistribution scheme likely mean that the food situation will not stabilize any time soon in Zimbabwe. Our goal is not to politicize, but to depoliticize food aid in Zimbabwe. Food should be available to all based on humanitarian principles with any other consideration being inappropriate. That is the case everywhere we work. Hungry people cannot afford to be caught in political crossfire. There are those who would have us pull out in crisis situations to punish governments and take a stand on political or human rights issues. But WFP believes that emergency aid simply cannot be politicized -- for good or ill.
When people in power, be they government or rebels, deny food aid to certain vulnerable groups of the population, we will speak out. While we see our role as neutral and much like the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, our member states have also asked us to be advocates for the hungry. That has put us on a tightrope and in a perpetual balancing act. When governments take economic actions such as banning private trade or monopolizing food imports that undermine the food sector and exacerbate hunger, our member states expect us to speak out and we will.
* What do you think about the statements made by James Morris on Iraq? How do you feel about the fact that enormous amounts of money have been spent on invading Iraq, when a fraction of that money could have been used to save lives in Africa? What are your thoughts about the fact that because Iraq has been destroyed by 12 years of sanctions and bombings, billions will be needed to rebuild it, diverting much needed aid away from Africa? Send your comments to [email protected]