How much can food aid help?

Press, 27 July 1985, Page 18

How much can food aid help?

The famine in Africa has touched the hearts and pockets of the well-fed as never before, but once the excitement of Live Aid wanes, what will the generosity have achieved? Will the aid be used properly? And will the response to this famine help ensure that famines do not happen again? The answers to these questions are not reassuring. From “The Economist,” London.

While the world is rushing help and money to Africa, the emer-gency-relief operation there is breaking down; not everywhere, and not uniformly, but at certain critical points, well-intentioned help is coming to nothing. In the western province of Sudan, Darfur, 2.8 million people — the entire population — are dying of hunger; 25,000-30,000 tonnes of food are needed every month. They are getting nothing. Darfur is linked to Port Sudan (the country’s only port) by a railway. This month, a bridge halfway along the railway was swept away by — irony of ironies — floods, cutting the rail link just at the point where the roads also peter out into the bush. It hardly matters that 300,000 tonnes of food is piled up, undisturbed, in Port Sudan. The starving in Darfur could not benefit from more international help even if it were sent. In Ethiopia, Mr Kurt Jansson, the special representative of the United Nations, sits in a small office in Addis Ababa trying to make sure aid gets through to those who need it. He has ordered the suspension of all food-aid shipments because the Government has failed to clear the backlog in its three ports. Rotting food is bad enough, but is only part of a wider failure: those who give food aid and who organise its distribution are not paying enough attention to how it is being used. This article is about their failure. To describe it may seem unkind to the good-hearted people who have saved hundred of thousands of lives, and more than callous to the famine victims. Any critic should therefore start by giving credit where it is due, and by making clear what the relief operation should not be criticised for. Not, surely, for meanness. By most standards, the response of western countries has been remarkably generous (Russia and other communist countries have been remarkable for their meanness). The World Food Programme (W.F.P.), the agency mainly responsible for shipping free food to Africa, reckons that Africa needed 7 million tonnes of food aid in the past 12 months; 5.5 million tonnes of food aid has been promised so far, worth more than $1 billion. (The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s figures for the same period show nearly all of the need has been met by promises. Aid numbers change fast, and involve inspired guesswork.) Whatever the exact number, more free food has been delivered than in any similar operation. A little more than 1 million tonnes were shipped during each of the two years, 1973 and 1974, which marked the height of the Sahel’s previous dreadful famine. In addition, $3OO million of emergency aid — blankets, medicines — has been earmarked for Africa this time, plus a further $2 billion for longerterm assistance — irrigation projects, new seeds, and so on. As most Governments have been trying to squeeze their aid budgets, this response seems impressive. A closer look is less comforting. Of the 5.5 million tonnes of food promised for 1984-85, only 3.9 million tonnes have so far been delivered to the dockside; far less has reached the villages. And of the roughly $2 billion promised for the various special funds for Africa, a large chunk — our best guess is a quarter — has been filched from existing aid budgets. Britain, for instance, provided £ 95 million in 1984 and has promised at least £6O million in 1985-86; all but £8 million of that came from the already-agreed aid budget.

All the same, the relief operation can hardly be criticised for standing by when Africans were dying. Nor has it faltered for lack of urgency among the aid workers, and it has had some undeniable successes. The harrowing scenes on television fail to communicate one crucial fact: that only Ethiopia (certainly) and western Sudan (probably) have suffered from mass starvation — in the sense that, across vast tracts, no community has escaped. Many more people would have died in other countries — Chad, Mali — but for the rescue efforts; and seven countries — Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Zambia, Rwanda, Burundi and Lesotho — which last year needed free food, no longer do so. That, it might seem, is enough. Aid has been given, lives saved. But how close is the connection? How much of the credit for saving lives should go to free food? Consider first the amount of food aid that is available compared to total need. Many people who have given money to Africa think that their contributions will bridge the gap between what African countries need to eat this year and what they grew themselves last harvest. In fact, though the W.F.P. says 21 African countries needed only 7 million tonnes of food aid, the difference between the food they need and what they grew themseives was 12 million tonnes. The free food delivered so far — 3.9 million tonnes — is less than a third of total needs. In only three of the 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa which needed food aid this year has it covered more than 40 per cent of what they needed. Even that proportion was more than the countries could handle: two of the three exceptions were Ethiopia and Sudan, which have the worst transport and bureaucratic bottlenecks. Moreover, not all food aid was what most people would understand by the term — that is, sacks of grain shipped out and given away to hungry people. One of the main responses to the African famine has been a big increase in “programme aid” — food given to Governments to sell in the markets. About a third of all America’s 3.1 million tonnes and 60 per cent of the E.E.C.’s (multilateral) 790,000 tonnes is programme aid. Such aid is more like budgetary support than free food. In theory it enables Governments to buy seeds, ploughs, and tractors from the proceeds of the food sales. They can also afford civil servants’ salaries and tanks. It might not seem to matter. When African Governments sell food they increase the amount of food available in the market places — but only in urban ones and the food benefits only those with enough money to buy it. Even where the food is given to the Government to give away to the starving, not all of it ends up where it should. Some is simply stolen. One guess the Ethiopian Government is giving 30,000 tonnes of food a month to soldiers and civil servants. It is impossible to know exactly how much food aid is being sold or stolen in this way. Not much, perhaps, is stolen; more is sold. Nevertheless, it still leaves the bulk — probably over half — of food aid to be given away free. And that, too, can cause problems. The real criticism is that people have reacted to the African famine by shutting their eyes and flinging free food at it. Mr Bob Geldofs Live Aid has raised $7O million, driven by a popular enthusiasm which moved mountains, but enthusiasm is not the virtue needed now.

Africa no longer needs free food everywhere, if it ever did. Parts of the continent are getting too much emergency aid. This is true for countries as a whole: Senegal is probably getting more free food than it needs. It is even truer inside countries: villages that no longer need free food continue to receive it. Famines are not caused by the failure of a single “national harvest,” but by a variety of failures, each of different intensity, of each village's several crops. The cotton harvest, for example, was good last year in the Sudan and the Sahel where it is an important cash crop. Even in this latest famine, hunger struck in pockets. Some crops, some villages were only marginally affected. Moreover, famine — unlike other natural disasters — chooses its victims. While floods or earthquakes can overwhelm everything and everybody in their path, children and the old are usually the first to die of the diseases that lack of food has left them prey to. The aid operation in Africa has not always narrowed the gap between the starving and the survivors; sometimes it simply creates new gaps. For example, refugees in the relief camps have been treated well. Some of the camps have become relatively prosperous. Outside, many are still starving. That in itself is not reason enough for scepticism about the relief operation: if lives are saved, so much the better; but its achievement carries a long-term threat. Free food is weakening the capacity of communities to respond to famine. Countries have complex defence mechanisms against drought that local farmers know but international food bureaucrats and aid workers often do not. In the Sahel, when the cereal crops (millet, sorghum) fail, other farmers who produce tubers (cassava, yams) rush to sell their surplus to the cereal farmers. The distribution of cereal food aid has severed that link. This year, tuber farmers have not been able to find so many customers; next year they might grow less. Migration is another way in which farmers traditionally react to drought, moving their herds

away from the brownest pastures. Now they go to the nearest relief camps instead. This is not laziness. It is a rational decision. Food brought in from outside has proved a reliable way of feeding their families — but it is creating food aid drones. This is particularly true at the moment, when the harvest season is starting to spread across the Sahel to east Africa. With it should come recovery, at least in those parts of the continent which did not suffer from mass starvation. The Government of Niger is trying to help it alonng by making aid harder to get: it has halved the number of distribution points from 300 to 150, and is slowing the distribution of food from those remaining camps. In Ethiopa, the Government even burnt down some of the huts in a refugee camp for the exstarving, to persuade them to return to their villages. Mr Trevor Page, head of the World Food Programme’s emergency services, calls the emer-gency-relief operations “the last bastion of unprofessionalism.” This may not always be a bad thing (Mr Geldof is the kind of amateur who can achieve more than the professionals), but it is clear that the relief operations could be improved. Small, incremental changes could have made the first stage of the relief operation, more effective. The early-warning system needs sharpening, to make it more convincing to more people. And, to speed up the response further, extra food could be stockpiled in the drought-affected countries. This carries its own risks: the Government of Niger literally bankrupted its biggest bank by forcing it to bear the cost of increasing stocks. Donors should therefore consider stock finance a good use of their aid budgets for at least the next few years. The aid effort could also be improved now. More emphasis needs to be put on distributing food. This is a matter, first, of getting more lorries to go from port to village. The United Nation’s Office of Emergency Operations in Africa reckons that, this year alone, $250 million is needed for transporting food inside Africa.

Then, more use needs to be made of what food is available in famine-stricken countries: ® Private grain traders crisscross Africa. They are often sharks but can still be used to help the starving. In parts of Niger and Mali, the W.P.F. is using food aid as “capital” for rural food banks. This gives villagers some bargaining power when ja trader offers to sell them food. They can point to the food bank as proof that they will have seed for next year’s harvest, encouraging the trader to give them food on credit. © Buying food locally is often quicker and easier than shipping it from outside. Oxfam and Unicef have both done this in Ethiopia. The biggest national and international agencies almost never buy locally. The voluntary agencies have proved themselves braver and more efficient at almost every turn than their state counterparts. They are now distributing around half of all the food aid in the Ethiopian countryside. But there are limits to how much they can do. Their strength lies in providing individual care; they cannot move millions of tonnes. The answer is not to make the voluntary agencies take on more of the Governments’ work. It is to make the Governments work like the voluntary agencies. All that is for the emergency operation, but the African emergency is coming to an end; the long slog to put agriculture on its feet is beginning again. It will require extra aid because of the famine. In Ethiopia and western Sudan, communities and families have been broken up, fields allowed to revert to the bush. The ingredients of agricultural progress have been proved in Asian countries: decent prices for farmers,, competitive exchange rates, advisory services, credit, new seeds, and technologies that are adapted to local conditions. The formula is working in Zimbabwe and Malawi, and could do so elsewhere. As the emergency operation has shown, learning lessons is easy. The hard part is to apply them. Copyright, “The Economist.”