It is hard for those who live in a world of constantly restocked supermarket shelves to imagine what it is like to look out from your home at fields of failing crops and skeletal dying animals, and know that, very soon, there will be absolutely nothing left with which to feed your family.
This is the fate that once again faces sub-Saharan Africans. The United Nations estimates that from the Horn of Africa, through large parts of southern Africa to the Sahel Desert, more than 30 million people are in imminent danger of starvation, because yet again rains have failed.
War and misgovernment on a spectacular scale have undoubtedly contributed to this disaster but little can ever be done to reverse the elemental forces that bring drought. Yet again, the rest of the world must mobilize its resources to bring succor to those whose livelihoods have been destroyed by Nature itself. Past aid efforts have included the provision of seed crops, tools and the sinking of water holes. Such efforts were designed to improve the productivity of agriculture so they could move away from precarious subsistence farming. But nothing grows without rain.
In the developed world, there is donor fatigue. The idea grows up among people who in the past have given frequently to famine aid charities, that it is surely the victims who are somehow to blame. A particularly common assumption is that peasants who need to rely on handouts of international food aid become dependent upon their donors and, so, no longer try to plant and cultivate food for themselves.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The private donors’ mistake is to believe that in giving, they are fixing a problem that will thereafter go away. Unfortunately drought is not like that. The rains will return to Africa in due time and the crops will grow, but then no doubt they will fail elsewhere.
The sums of money involved in this latest rescue effort seem to be immense. One estimate is suggesting that nearly half a billion dollars of food aid will be needed to support Africa’s famine victims until next year’s harvest. And even that figure may not be enough to allow peasants both the strength and the resources to go out, prepare their dusty fields and plant fresh crops in the hope that the rains will come to nourish them.
The World Bank has pledged $100 million of food aid, just to Ethiopia where 11 million people are facing the worst famine since 1984. The Ethiopian government is hoping, however, that it will not have to draw on the World Bank money, because sufficient help will arrive from outside countries and non-government organizations.
The developed world might find it easier to accept these huge demands from the unfortunate Third World, if they remember how very different are their own values. On Friday night, thieves broke into an Amsterdam museum and stole two paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Though an exact figure has not been given, experts estimate that together, these two oil paintings may well be worth in excess of $100 million. A single painting by this artist, “Portrait of Doctor Gachet” sold for $82.5m. Wonderful and rare though these pictures may be, can they ever be worth the food aid necessary to keep 11 million Ethiopians from dying next year?
