LET THEM EAT CAKE

Africa is starving ... and yet it has the most fertile land on the planet. Some are blaming GM, others poor government. Who's right? (Fred Bridgland, 01 June 2003, Sunday Herald)

[T]he GM food-African starvation issue is becoming one of the great moral dilemmas of the early 21st century. US President George Bush, prior to his current visit to Europe for the G8 summit, accused European nations of impeding US efforts to reduce hunger in Africa by opposing the use of GM crops. 'Our partners in Europe have blocked all new bio-crops because of unfounded, unscientific fears,' Bush said. 'This has caused many African nations to avoid investing in bio-technologies for fear that their products will be shut out of European markets.'

The Bush case is either fuelled by Machiavellian concerns or deep humanitarian motives, depending on how you interpret the man who leads the world's most powerful nation.

The Zambian government, for one in Africa, believes the Bush case is entirely Machiavellian. It banned US GM maize from entering the country at the height of its own famine late last year. President Levy Mwanawasa said he would rather his citizens went hungry than have its indigenous maize contaminated by GM and risk losing future potential export markets in Europe because its crops had become GM-contaminated.

Now, following good rains, Zambia has banned food aid altogether because it has been undermining the local market by forcing prices down and discouraging Zambian farmers from producing.

Zambia is a classic case study of how complex the food problem is in Africa and why simplistic and emotive solutions like those of Texan US presidents, Boomtown Rats bandsmen and others should be treated with scepticism.

Zambia, like certain other African countries such as Angola and Zimbabwe, has such widespread good soils, such abundant supplies of fresh water and such a benign climate that it should, given sound social, economic and political strategies supported by wisely and carefully targeted aid, be able to feed the whole of Africa by itself.

It had through the 1960s, 70s and 80s one of Africa's more pleasant presidents in the shape of Kenneth Kaunda. Unfortunately, Kaunda had faith in what can only be described as economics of the madhouse. At one time he called in the Maharishi Yogi to transform the economy, but more critically from the early 1970s onwards he set the controlled price at which the Zambian Agriculture Board compulsorily purchased maize and other staples from farmers below the cost of production.

The consequence was disaster. Commercial farmers stopped producing maize and turned to products whose prices were not controlled, such as strawberries, carnations and cattle, for export. Peasant farmers ceased producing more than was necessary for daily sustenance. Meanwhile, Chinese labourers building a railway across Zambia were producing three crops a year, including individual giant cabbages of world record dimensions, to feed themselves and marvelling that any country on earth could be so fertile.

The World Food Programme stepped in and for nearly three decades supplied 50% or more of Zambia's food needs. Zambia's failure to build adequate storage facilities for grains and the collapse of road transport systems and roads themselves that that had brought milk and other fresh produce from distant rural areas to Lusaka and the Copperbelt contributed to the decline. Only now is Zambia really tackling the surmountable obstacles that have prevented it from becoming one of the world's breadbaskets. Irrigation canals are at last being dug and simple treadle pumps, not dependent on electricity, are being distributed to peasant farmers who have been entirely neglected since independence three decades ago.

Even in Ethiopia the cat's cradle of issues is not as simple as at first sight. Our compassion, our urges to find ways to help people help themselves, finish in dead ends if we try to flatten realities under the weight of self-indulgent moralising.

The tricky fact is that much of Ethiopia, where some four million people are currently on the verge of starvation, is currently as fecund and green as any cropland on earth. The UN's newly released report on the Ethiopian food emergency reads: 'This lush landscape hides a famine that, although widely attributed to last year's drought, is the result of structural deficiencies, scarcity of land, overpopulation and lack of development.' There lie a multitude of sins that no amount of food aid, genetically modified or otherwise, can assuage.

One of the most fundamental causes of Ethiopia's recurrent famine was the herding of the peasantry into vast collective villages, resulting in a collapse in traditional agricultural production and folk knowledge, by the country's former murderous Stalinist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, currently living in luxury on a farm in Zimbabwe where he is protected by President Robert Mugabe.

The succession of mistakes, becoming a swirling vicious circle, that began with Mariam have been manifested most recently in so-called New Variant Famine, in which the HIV/Aids pandemic speeds up recurrent disaster. Ethiopia's leaders have failed to tackle HIV/Aids with sufficient resources and energy. More than two million people are infected. As the numbers rise so the number of able-bodied agriculturalists is reduced and the number of food-dependent, non- productive individuals grow.

'Aid [to Ethiopia] in the short term might have saved lives, but in the long term it seems things are getting worse,' Berahanu Nega, director of the Addis Ababa-based Ethiopian Economic Association, told the UN's IRIN news organisation. 'I sometimes wonder what a country like mine would look like if there were no foreign aid. For sure, one of the things I think would happen is that government would be much more responsive to its own citizens.' The link between state and society is seriously severed in countries like Ethiopia because of donors.

'The six million that were starving in the last famine are now a permanent food-insecure population in this country, even under good weather conditions. What used to be an emergency has become a permanent feature. Something must have gone seriously wrong, but unfortunately that discussion is not yet taking place.

'It is embarrassing for us as Ethiopians. At the end of the day, it is our crisis that we have failed to address. The food crisis is entirely our own. It is the way we handle our economy, our policies as a society, it is something we have to come to terms with.'

I missed the part where GM food potentially deserves blame for the problems in Africa. It looks like they are the fault of bad governance in African nations and in Europe. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2003 4:45 PM