Fat Cats Decide Africa’s Fate

In the run-up to tomorrow’s G-8 summit to be held at an exclusive Scottish golf resort-turned-high security enclave, those who care about Africa’s poorest have been doing their utmost to raise the public conscience.

The hope is that the world’s most powerful men will not only double aid to sub-Saharan Africa and cancel all debts but will also go a significant step further by demolishing trade tariffs, quotas and export subsidies.

Last week, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown displayed his passion for alleviating extreme poverty in Africa by attacking the “hypocrisy” of those rich nations, which effectively close their doors to Third World imports, while dumping their own excess farm produce on developing nations at rock bottom prices. Worst protectionist offenders are EU members, the US and Japan.

Lord Foulkes, a former minister for international development, maintains trade “is the most important issue of all”, while pointing out the obscenity of more being “spent on a cow in France than on a child’s education in Ghana.”

Billions around the world tuned in to the simultaneous Live 8 concerts and watched images of more than 200,000 “Make Poverty History” protesters, who flooded the streets of Edinburgh. But, for me, the greatest wake-up calls were two documentaries presented by the award-winning African filmmaker Sorious Samura, broadcast on CNN last Sunday.

In the first, “Living with Refugees”, Samura travels with a family of refugees fleeing Darfur in the hope of finding refuge in Chad. Head of the family Adam has two wives and eight children but due to lack of food and money, and with only one overburdened donkey, he is forced to leave one wife and some of his children behind.

After a three-day journey during which the group is joined by other frightened and hungry individuals going in the same direction, the UN— sponsored camp is finally spotted.

At last! Now there will be tents, water and food for everyone. But the smiles of the family, and the exhausted filmmaker who has been similarly surviving, soon dissipate as they learn that first, they must register with the camp’s management as a prerequisite to being allocated World Food Program rations.

Hope turns to despair when they are further appraised that only a tribal leader is qualified to sponsor their registration and, in any event, the red tape involved will take weeks. So, there they remain living on meager handouts from generous fellow refugees with barely enough to feed themselves until a new camp eventually opens up nearby.

Samura says the nights were the worst, listening to the cries of children with empty bellies, while attempting to sleep on the cold, often muddy, ground.

In “Surviving Hunger”, Samura heartily tucks into pasta at a London restaurant before joining inhabitants of a remote Ethiopian village during the hottest months, where giant flies carpet almost everything, including the faces of babies.

There, his home for two months is a mud hut and his diet mainly a green weed, which the villagers are forced to eat to fill their stomachs even though it makes them vomit.

Samura discovers that up to 40 million Africans subsist on this kind of diet, even though their work is often backbreaking as they endeavor to plow their parched fields. Samura returns home more than 20 kilograms lighter and a lot wiser.

Hardly had the implications of Samura’s experiences sunk in when I chanced upon a reality show, which follows the diet and exercise regimes of hugely obese Westerners.

There, they were lifting weights in their shiny gyms and paddling around in Olympic-sized pools while complaining that they missed the delights of burgers and French fries. Instead, they were destined to a life of sushi, grilled steaks, chicken, fish and green salads. It fair brings tears to one’s eyes, doesn’t it?

A column by Paul Krugman in yesterday’s New York Times titled “The Girth of a Nation” points out that 30 percent of American adults are now considered obese, with obesity becoming prevalent among adolescents and children.

Krugman complains about pundits who “still dismiss American pudge as a benign ‘affliction of affluence’; a sign that people can afford to eat tasty foods, drive cars and avoid hard physical labor.”

The Journal of the American Medical Association claims that over 300,000 Americans die from obesity-related diseases annually.

It’s a similar situation in Britain where obesity is now linked to more deaths than smoking and coronary heart disease has become a No. 1 killer. There, some 20 percent of the populated are classified as obese, which is costing the economy and the National Health Service more than $4 billion annually.

Surely the gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been as glaring. On the one hand, millions die each year; their stomachs distended from malnutrition, and on the other, people in the West are dying with equally distended bellies, their arteries clogged with fat.

This discrepancy is enough to make any visiting alien confused about mankind, if not disgusted at how a comparatively indolent and replete half of the planet often intent on becoming the most beautiful people in the graveyard with the help of personal trainers and plastic surgeons, while people inhabiting the other half are left to grow old and die, at the average age of 40.

There is something very, very wrong here folks. Samura’s thought-provoking films should be required viewing for the puissant and the polished at Gleneagles, perhaps, between sorties onto the golf course. For, as things stand, it doesn’t look as if dismantling trade barriers is seriously on the agenda. George W. Bush has already said he intends to put US interests first when it comes to trade barriers and climate change.

In the meantime, his Scottish namesake and nemesis is firmly on the American president’s trail. The British parliamentarian George Galloway who recently flew to Washington where he dressed down a Senate committee is heading for Gleneagles with a band of demonstrators.

Despite objections from the local council and security forces, Galloway has announced that he intends to get as close as possible to the world’s leaders, whom he terms “desperadoes”. “We’re marching to Gleneagles. That’s nonnegotiable,” he told the paper Scotland on Sunday.

“We have a right to march on the streets of our own country against the presence in our own country of dangerous foreign and domestic leaders...” responsible for “an economic system, which is the biggest mass killer the world has ever seen.”

Many would disagree with Galloway’s methods and tone, but I, for one, can’t argue with his logic. Africa’s children, dying each day from preventable diseases, such as malaria and malnutrition, and orphaned by the AIDS virus because their parents could not afford life-sustaining drugs, are desperately waiting.