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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 14KB | 281 lines

<text> <title> The Forgotten Famine </title> <article> <hdr> Africa Report, May-June 1991 The Forgotten Famine </hdr> <body> By Nick Cater, British writer, broadcaster, and consultant on development issues. Amid the deepening tragedy of famine deaths in Sudan and Ethiopia, food aid experts and climatologists in the U.S., Europe, and Africa are warning that the failure of this year's rains--due in the next few months--could throw millions more across the Sahel into a crisis well beyond the capacity of national governments or international agencies to tackle. Throughout Africa, 20 million people were assessed as "at risk" at the start of 1991 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) following two years of bad harvests in many countries, with the latest estimates of 5.1 million tons of food aid required and hundreds of millions of dollars for transport to deliver it, a total cost put by the World Food Programme (WFP) at well over $1 billion. Without good rains and a good harvest, these figures will rise sharply next year. Those comparing today's drought with that of 1984-85 go beyond tonnages. Reports from the Geneva-based League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies emphasize the vulnerability of millions of Africans: deeper national economic crises, bigger debts, eroded welfare structures, increased populations, degraded environments, renewed conflict and refugee flows, and the poor grain and livestock reserves of farmers and herdspeople who had not recovered from the last disaster when the latest crisis arrived. Appeals for victims of Liberia's civil war have joined calls for help for 4 million threatened in Mozambique and Angola, adding to pressure on the financially beleaguered UN High Commissioner for Refugees, but it is in the Horn and Sahel where fears are greatest of a catastrophe far worse than in 1984-85. Political and military factors are hampering food deliveries in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Increasing numbers of displaced people and refugees are fleeing fighting in all three countries. In the Sahel, two years of patchy rains have left Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania struggling to secure enough food aid to keep hunger from becoming starvation. Warnings have come thick and fast. Gary Eilerts, a senior official of the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said: "Problems in many African nations are already severe. Failed rains in 1991 will plunge the western Sahelian countries into a crisis of similar proportions to that faced by Ethiopia and Sudan this year. We could be looking at a gigantic disaster." Among so many disasters, Sudan stands out because of the scale of the crisis, the complexities of food delivery in the face of war and political chaos, and the obstructive nature of the Islamic fundamentalist military junta. Roger Winter, director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, warned recently: "Children are already dying, and within weeks thousands of other Sudanese of all ages will begin to die what were once avoidable deaths from war and drought-induced famine." With the pre-rains hungry season gripping Sudan, there is anger at how the junta--embarrassed by a failed self-sufficiency campaign--at first dismissed its disastrous last harvest as merely a "food gap" and has hampered aid agencies and blocked food distribution to Sudanese ethnic groups it apparently regards as its enemies because of the civil war in the south with the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army. In particular, officials of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are privately furious at the constant harassment of Operation Lifeline Sudan and other efforts to deliver food to civilians in conflict zones, from unrealistic demands about the proportion of aid to be delivered into junta and SPLA-controlled areas, to bombing schools, hospitals, and dirt airstrips in the south. General Omer al-Beshir's often incompetent regime has abused human rights, allowing its fundamentalist supporters to run "ghost house" torture centers, while mishandling the food crisis by shuffling officials and responsibilities for relief, food stocks, displaced people, and refugees between ministries. Hungry for arms, in 1989 and 1990, the junta even sold harvest surpluses rather than build up its strategic reserves. As in 1984-85, when then-President Gaafar al-Nimeiry was ousted, in part because of his mishandling of the famine, many of Sudan's 25 million people are today on the move, searching for food, forage, and work as grain costs and livestock prices crash. Up to 10 million people are at risk in Sudan, according to FAO estimates, with 1.2 million tons of grain required. Camps of the displaced have formed around El Obeid and other towns in the west since a severe harvest failure last year in Kordofan and Darfur regions, while thousands are trekking into Omdurman to join many who never left after the last famine. In the east, worst hit are again Beja people of the Red Sea hills, whose old and young have begun to come down to beg and--it is expected--die along the main Port Sudan-Khartoum road. Even in Khartoum, where 2 million or more people displaced by war and hunger from the south, east, and west live in rat- infested shantytowns, food is not reaching those who need it. Indeed, lured by the regime's hollow promises of Operation Lifeline food and a small cash grant, tens of thousands of southern women and children have tried to go home, only to have junta-backed militias on the north-south border steal their last possessions. Overland convoys by such groups as Norwegian Church Aid and World Vision are keeping the southernmost Equatoria region supplied with at least some food, while SPLA-besieged Juba town survives on a Lutheran World Federation airlift. Hundreds of miles away, the Bahr El Ghazal and Upper Nile regions--particularly the heartlands of the largest ethnic group and strongest SPLA supporters, the Dinka--are rarely reached by road, air, river or railway while fighting continues and the junta blocks aid efforts. Epidemics of meningitis and leishmaniasis known locally as kala azar are growing as hunger lowers resistance and drug supplies are exhausted. Around the rebel-held town of Yirol, 35,000 died of meningitis in the last year as food ran out; Sudanese are fleeing into Zaire and the Central African Republic. Roger Winter has already drawn comparisons with 1988, when the then democratically elected government unleashed army-backed Arab militias on southerners in a bloody campaign of murder, rape, and enslavement, while denying access to humanitarian groups. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children walked for weeks to escape into Ethiopia; 250,000 died on the road. The 1988 Sudanese arrivals are still there, joined in eastern Ethiopia by a flood of refugees and Ethiopian returnees escaping the fighting in Somalia. Food aid needs for Somalia, including its remaining Ethiopian refugees, have been assessed at 226,000 tons, although the focus of relief has so far been on urban areas, especially Mogadishu, where one aid agency helping to run a hospital was forced to hire a local militia to prevent ethnically related killings on the wards. The refugee flow into Ethiopia--up to 1 million Sudanese and Somalis have already arrived--coincides with rapidly expanding rebel activity in Tigray and Eritrea, as troops of the coalition Eritrean People's Revolutionary Democratic Front advance to within 50 miles of Addis Ababa. Ironically, the last Ethiopian harvest was a record, but Tigray and Eritrea suffered major crop failures and some surveys of children are finding severe malnutrition rates of 40 percent. Overland supply routes through Sudan organized by Western relief agencies and the rebel-r