By: Hugh B. Price
President
National Urban League
Here in this land of plenty, where in many cities and suburbs a fast-food joint, a delicatessen, a coffee bar, or a greengrocer stand seem to be just one block ahead, and we're being warned that too many American kids are overweight, it's difficult to understand what famine-a state of extreme hunger, approaching starvation-looks like.
And even when we see its victims, gaunt and hollow-eyed, they always seem much farther away from us than the distance measured by the miles that separate their country from ours.
It may be particularly less difficult now to feel distanced from those peoples caught in the grip of famine because of the multiple crises the world is facing: the worldwide threat of terrorism; the conflagration in the Middle East; the still-simmering conflicts between India and Pakistan over the province of Kashmir; the still-advancing spread of AIDS to more and more countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and so on.
Let's hope it's not.
According to United Nations officials, countries in the southern arc of Africa are facing severe shortages of food, raising the specter of starvation for millions and millions of people. Two U.N. agencies, the World Food Program and the Food & Agricultural Organization, have said that 12.8 million people face serious food shortages until the region's main harvest in April 2003.
A recent dispatch in the New York Times reports that Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Lesotho have officially declared themselves to be in the grip of a national disaster. Mozambique and Swaziland are on the verge of doing so.
"We see this as a crisis of enormous proportions. The situation worsens with each day,"said Jean-Jacques Graisse, deputy executive director for the U.N. food program. Out on the front lines, the WFP's officer for Malawi put it more alarmingly to the Times. "People who have seen what famine looks like are very scared right now."
The current crisis has several causes. A combination of drought in some countries and heavy, ruinous rains in others have sharply reduced the region's harvest for the last two years, contributing to shortages of feed grain. The ravages of HIV/AIDS have sharply reduced the number of people available to work farms. Several countries' economic performance has tailed off sharply, and these developments have been exacerbated by political instability or questions of corruption in some others, notably Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Although food aid officials say the current crisis is primarily an environmentally induced one, the presence of"politics"as a contributing factor should come as no surprise-and should not be an excuse for inaction. Politics is always at play when famine grips a population.
Millions of people in the secretive, largely closed country of North Korea remain threatened by a decade-long famine. More than two million are said to have died there since the mid-1990s, and 40 percent of North Korean children under five years of age are said to be malnourished. It's also widely suspected that a significant proportion of he food donated to the country to relieve the famine (the U.S. is the largest food donor) gets diverted to Communist Party officials and their favorites.
Beyond these particular instances, there's the"global politics"of attacking world hunger. The U.N.'s World Food Program estimates that roughly 815 million people around the globe go to bed hungry every day. In the mid-1990s the world's wealthy nations pledged to donate enough food to cut that number in half by 2015; but since then, their interest, and donations, have waned sharply in the face of arguments between rich and poor nations over such matters as trade barriers, agricultural subsidies, and aid for rural economic development.
These are important matters, to be sure, but the nations which"have"shouldn't lose sight of the comment from the WFP official in Malawi: "People who have seen what famine looks like are very scared right now."
Agency officials estimate that the peoples of these southern African countries need 1.2 million tonnes of food aid immediately in order to relieve hunger, and four million tonnes over the course of the next year until the 2003 harvests comes.
The United States government, whose wealth of food stocks enable it to give more in food aid than any other nation, must take the lead on this and respond immediately-so that in these countries we can prevent their citizens from seeing what famine looks like.
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