Washington, DC — The spread of famine in Africa now threatens well over 30 million people and is overwhelming the capacity of relief agencies to address the problem, the World Food Program warned in mid-October. On World Food Day, two United Nations agencies have offered a grim prognosis -- both of the danger of famine and of Africa's capacity to address the underlying causes of famine, hunger and malnutrition.
"Africa is especially hard hit by drought and other factors this year," says World Food Program spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume. In a telephone interview with allAfrica from Geneva, she cataloged the mind numbing numbers: 14.4 million people at risk in southern Africa, an estimated 14 million more in Ethiopia, one million in Sudan, 1.4 million in Eritrea and 1.5 million in Mauritania and neighboring countries.
An additional 3 million could be at risk in Angola, recently emerged from decades of war, and 1.9 million are threatened in Ivory Coast, unless there is a peaceful solution soon to the current rebellion that has split the country.
The UN has released individual warnings about famine in several parts of Africa, but the accumulation of crisis - Berthiaume warned -- is now "threatening to overwhelm the system." Adding to the problem this year is that the UN is dealing with food crisis not just in Africa, but also in Kosovo, East Timor, North Korea, Afghanistan and Central America. So far, contributions for food are not sufficient even to cover the needs for 2002. "The donor contributions are not coming," she said.
Even in areas where there is no acute famine, many Africans face a growing problem of chronic hunger and malnutrition. "To put it bluntly, the state of food security in the world is not good," writes Jacques Diouf, Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in an introduction to the 2002 edition of the State of Food Insecurity in the World, released October 15. Diouf added that progress in increasing food security has "virtually ground to a halt." The benchmark report says 196 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished -- and that those number are still growing.
"Sub-Saharan Africa continues to have the highest prevalence of undernourishment and also has the largest increase in the number of undernourished people," the FAO says. "But the situation in Africa is not uniformly grim." The report goes on to note that much of the increase is accounted for by the tripling of the number of undernourished people in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In contrast, in West Africa both the prevalence and number of undernourished people has been reduced significantly by efforts to increase rice production. In KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, researchers have also successfully developed a program to increase local production and consumption of vegetables to address micronutrient malnutrition.
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Drought and conflict are the two most common causes of hunger and malnutrition, but the FAO suggests that poverty, systems of land tenure and dietary deficiencies are also major contributing factors. "Improving access to land can have a major impact on reducing poverty and hunger," the report says. The study goes on to report that food security and land distribution are also related and that small farms tend to be more productive and offer more employment to surrounding populations than large estates.
This year the FAO places a particular emphasis on people who live in mountain areas in Africa and around the world. Eighty-eight million people in Sub-Saharan Africa live in mountainous regions, mostly along the East African rift that stretches from Ethiopia down through Burundi and Zimbabwe to South Africa. Almost half of this population lives in the Ethiopian highlands, where the FAO reports the traditional farming system based on local grains, cattle, sheet and goats "cannot reliably support the existing of projected population."
The greatest tragedy of all, however, is that this situation is reversible. "We do not have the excuse that we cannot grow enough or that we do not know enough about how to eliminate hunger," declares Diouf in his introduction to this report. He notes that a public investment of $24 billion a year - less than ten percent of what the developed economies spend on agricultural subsidies per year - would be sufficient to "jump start" a campaign against hunger.
"The cost of inaction is prohibitive. The cost of progress is both calculable and affordable," says Diouf.
