Lilongwe, Malawi — "When I see the kind of spirit and energy with which people are working in so many of the villages we visited and how much they are able to make of so little, it gives me hope." That's the assessment of Peter Bell, president of CARE, one of the largest aid organizations in the world, following a visit to Malawi in southern Africa last month. Bell says the region is not yet facing full-blown famine but is in the midst of a "food crisis" which can be overcome with sufficient international assistance. AllAfrica's Charlie Cobb accompanied Bell on the trip and interviewed him at the conclusion. Excerpts:
CARE is a large international organization. Of all the countries with problems to address, why are you here in Malawi?
First of all, we do work in 68 countries around the world, but our highest priority is sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia. Within sub-Saharan Africa, Malawi is, with the exception of Eritrea, the newest country for CARE. We've only been operational here for three years. We're very concerned about the drought in Malawi and the food crisis, combined with HIV/Aids. That's why I'm here, to see first hand, to see our staff in the field, to thank them and to learn the extent of the crisis and what we and others can do to help overcome it.
What do CARE's numbers show about the situation here in Malawi?
At this point we really don't have good, independent reliable data. We're relying primarily on the World Food program's data. They suggest to us that approximately 3 million people are at risk of severe malnutrition over the coming months. And yet as I've gone out to villages over the last several days, we've seen that the current estimates, which put about 15 percent of the population at risk, are underestimates.
What are some of the indications?
I visited one food station where CARE workers were distributing sacks of food to people, and what we found were quite a large number of women, in particular, who had come to complain that they had not been identified as being sufficiently needy for food and yet, they were suggesting, they were even more needy than their neighbors.
Who does the identification?
This work has actually been done by CARE in conjunction with local committees. But we use certain criteria. For example, we know that women who head households are particularly vulnerable. That households that have large numbers of orphans are also particularly vulnerable. So we use these criteria but we have a limit at this stage of 15 percent of a given population and that's inadequate.
Why limit assistance to 15 percent of the population?
That's the food that is available at this point. We expect increasing amounts of food [aid] as we get more deeply into the dry season.
And then in another village that I visited, we saw a significant number of women who are breast-feeding children who are listless and who are obviously suffering from severe malnutrition. If they were receiving assistance, it wasn't sufficient.
So will assistance increase? What does CARE do in that kind of situation? Do you come back to the States and say, 'Hey! the numbers are wrong. There's more...'
The assistance is programmed to increase, but even that might not be enough. In the short term, within CARE we have received some private funding. For example, US$500,000 from the Gates Foundation. We will use the largest portion of that to provide supplementary food in Malawi. When I go back to the United States, one of the first things I will be doing is approaching other private donors again to provide supplementary food. We unfortunately believe that it's going to be important to have another pipeline of food beyond that which has been opened by the World Food Program. And, as I speak, we have food en route from Johannesburg, which we purchased with the Gates money.
This might be an appropriate point to ask you to elaborate on the manner in which food is distributed. On the one hand you have these donor systems, which are not necessarily in sync with traditional systems. This sometimes results in food either not getting where it's supposed to be or perhaps being distributed much more widely because traditional leaders have pressures and obligations that donor organizations don't recognize.
We've seen over and over again where we will target particularly vulnerable families within communities and provide food to them. And then, what happens is that those women will go back to their villages, and the chief will take the food and divide it for the village as a whole, because there is tradition of sharing within the community. And when I was first exposed to this, I was shocked by it, frankly.
What did you think/
Well, this would be considered by Western standards a diversion of the purpose for which the food was given. But all of the people in the villages that we serve are poor. There is more or less poverty. But there is also a tradition of cohesiveness within the community. That's an important tradition to maintain. The communities with which we work have their own traditions, their own safety nets, and I suspect it would be unwise to second guess those traditions in many instances.
But what does this mean in terms of organizing future food distribution? Do you now -- and I suppose you have become particularly aware of community traditions on this trip -- factor this in as you think through providing food aid? And how do you factor this in?
It needs to be factored in. I think it probably calls for more food in the short term. That's the implication of it. One of the things that I've come to realize is that, at all levels in a situation of food crisis such as Malawi faces today, people are making life and death decisions. They're making decisions about who will live and who will die. Those decisions are being made by parents. They're being made by village chiefs. And in effect they are being made by agencies like CARE and the donors who give to CARE as well.
Because you have to decide just where this limited amount of food is going?
Exactly. And that is true within a family that may have six children but can only feed four of them -- at least decently. Or a family may have to decide whether to pay the school fees to send their child to school or whether to use those fees to provide food for another member of the family. These are difficult, painful decisions for families to make. And so it goes at a number of different levels.
Is this going to be an endless cycle of need? I know you've been visiting projects where you are hoping and trying to structure more permanent solutions, but are we looking at something that is basically going to be with us forever?
I don't believe so. At the same time, these are long-term problems. When the current crisis is overcome, there will be a recurrence of one kind or another because this crisis is complex. It is not only a drought. It is also a crisis of underlying poverty. And then on top of that there is the horrendous HIV/Aids pandemic, not to mention malaria.
So, these problems need to be pulled apart. Actually if you look back, until eight years ago Malawi had a dictatorship. Now it doesn't have a perfect political system, but it has an improved political system. And when I see the kind of spirit and energy with which people are working in so many of the villages we visited and how much they are able to make of so little, it gives me hope that Malawi will over time get its economy in shape so that it can, at least, make advances over where it is today.
Have you seen signs of that on this current trip?
Some wonderful instances of it. I visited a couple of projects where CARE has worked with local communities in constructing dams. In one community I visited, 45 families, in the midst of the drought, were raising winter crops of food. They had lush gardens of vegetables growing. I visited groups of women who had started with CARE's training and technical assistance, savings and loans groups. We had not put in any capital at all. These were very poor women who had mobilized resources and we had helped to train them to start small businesses so that they could sell goods in the market place. They were important to supplementing family income. I don't want to exaggerate things. They took great pride, for example, in being able to buy soap, hand soap for their households. That makes a tremendous difference in terms of hygiene. It's important to these families. Sitting in the United States it's hard for us to believe how important this is.
Traveling with you to some of these villages, I've observed that at one level people strike me as frustrated with their political leadership. They want much, much more from their leadership here than they are getting so far. On the other hand, they still seem unsure how to hold their political leadership accountable to what they want. I remember talking with one group in a village who said, 'Oh these politicians come to campaign and then we don't see them anymore until it's the next campaign.' They seem at a loss for how to organize themselves to demand more for what, in the end, will probably have more of an impact on their life than whatever emergency relief or even programs that CARE offers. Is it your impression that this is the situation? And how does an organization like CARE, which I would imagine has to walk a careful line between politics and providing relief and development services, function in all of this when clearly there is a connection between politics, political leadership and need?
Well first, I'm certainly not an expert on Malawi politics. What really amazes me in many respects is how much people are willing to take on themselves with how little they have. CARE over the last decade has increasingly made support for policy advocacy part and parcel of our programming. So that as we are working with communities, helping them to improve their schools, for example, giving them support to for parent-teacher associations, and school management committees; and helping them to do for themselves within that community, we are also at the same time training them in how to more effectively convey their needs and demands to government authorities, to the Ministry of Education, to the district authorities. That has become part and parcel of our work.
In CARE's Malawi organization we have 80 employees; 78 of them are from Malawi. One is from Zambia and our country director is from the United Kingdom. But CARE itself has joined in coalition with other nongovernmental organizations -- international and Malawian -- to try and encourage the government to be more accountable, for example, with its own education policies and plans. These are obviously just partial contributions, but I think they must be part and parcel of our approach to development. Increasingly we have trained our staff in what we call a 'rights-based approach' to development. We believe that communities not only have needs and responsibilities but they also have rights. They must have the capability to advocate to advance those rights.
Would you set what we've seen in Malawi these few days in a larger context? After all, Southern Africa is being battered by food emergencies. Could you assess the Malawi situation in the broader context of Southern Africa? And might not solutions need to be regional as opposed to national?
The situation in Southern Africa is one of food crisis. It is what we relief and development organizations call a 'slow onset emergency', because we've seen it coming for months. We, in fact, have been preparing and acting for some months. It's an irony of this kind of situation that it's only likely to capture world attention -- or at least the attention of major media and get newspaper headlines, to get daily coverage on CNN --- once the crisis hits full blown. And if that happens, we will have failed in some important measure.
So the worst has not yet occurred here in Malawi or Southern Africa?
No. That's when you have massive starvation, when you have real famine. You will notice that I use 'food crisis' rather than 'famine.' I'm going to reserve that and hope that it never happens.
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CARE is working in virtually all of these countries in Southern Africa, and we have formed a regional organization to respond so that we can work across borders, share resources where it would be important to do so. It is a regional problem that takes a little bit different form in each country.
Is the United States doing enough? Should it be doing more? Something different? Part of what drives this question is the controversy over genetically modified foodgrains proposed for Zambia.
The United States has certainly stepped up and made major commitments of food for the area. As I mentioned, I believe that the initial estimates were probably underestimates of what is needed and I think even more is going to be required. And the United States has also provided some development assistance for this part of the world. It's not the highest priority for the United States. In a country like Zimbabwe, its politics, the politics of President Mugabe, doesn't make it easier for international or for bilateral donors to be helpful. It's very important that the United States, the European countries andJapan come forward; and come forward not only with emergency assistance, but also with longer-term development. If Malawi and its neighbors are ever going to break out of this cycle, it will be because of this longer-term development assistance.
Do you think there is such a thing as 'donor fatigue?'
I don't believe in donor fatigue. I believe that if support for development has flagged, it's because some of us have not been sufficiently compelling in delivering our messages. Quite frankly, I think that the great cause of this century is the cause of reducing and ultimately ending poverty. It's the poor communities of this world that are in the front lines of this battle, but we're at least right behind them. It's incumbent on us to mobilize support for this battle against poverty.
I have to admit I have moments of discouragement because of the HIV/Aids pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. It's horrendous. It's nearly impossible to convey what it means in this part of the world. To think that, in the 1980s, Malawi had a life expectancy rate of something like 54 years. Today, it is 39 years. It's discouraging, yet people are mobilizing here. This is an area in which there has been strong political leadership here.
What's your sense of where the U.S. public is about the situation here? And I include in 'public' members of the U.S. Congress?
It's really hard to know. In the aftermath of September 11, so much of America has been absorbed in the war on terrorism. And yet, at the same time there is a large portion of the American public that knows that it is not enough to just fight in military security terms. People everywhere need a more positive vision. Hope, tolerance and opportunity go hand in hand together.
