Southern Africa not only faces the devastation of HIV and Aids, but also now a famine of disastrous proportions. Clever Ndhlovu reports back after visiting the area recently
More than 14 million people in six southern African countries are in urgent need of international food aid while the prospect of another year of severe droughts is looming over the region.
"Food is running out fast and millions of people simply cannot make it through the next several months without continued food aid," warned Judith Lewis, the World Food Program (WFP) southern Africa regional coordinator.
"Our lack of resources is seriously threatening the WFP's ability to feed these growing numbers of desperately hungry people - many of whom are suffering the double blow of HIV/Aids and food shortages," she said after a recent visit to several of the most affected countries, such as Zimbabwe and Malawi.
The WFP has also warned that in the long term, the situation will not be brought under control unless more is done to address economic woes, continued policy mismanagement, chronic poverty - and most of all, the devastating HIV/Aids pandemic that is severely debilitating the entire region.
In Zimbabwe, where over six million people, or more than half of the total population, are now in urgent need of food aid, there are already alarming reports from the countryside of people who are eating wild roots and fruits called mazhanje to survive.
In Harare and other towns, most people in high density suburbs, particularly those who are unemployed (70 per cent), can afford just one meagre meal per day. They are losing the battle with spiralling inflation - now over 175 per cent, but predicted to reach over 550 per cent by the end of the year 2003.
President Robert Mugabe is blaming the severe drought from last year for the present crisis. But Western governments and international relief organisations are insisting that Mugabe's failed economic policy and controversial land reforms have much to do with the famine in this country which used to export food.
Several thousand white farmers were evicted from their farms while the cash-strapped government lacked financial sources to even provide previously landless blacks with enough seed and fertilizer.
"More than 2,500 people are dying every week because of Aids," admitted the government-controlled daily, The Herald, "and this number is constantly increasing."
"It is like a vicious circle - hunger and malnutrition lead to a lowered immune system for the estimated 2.2 million HIV positive people in Zimbabwe, which make them more vulnerable to STDs, TB and fully-blown Aids," warn health experts in Harare.
Aids has already claimed the lives of about seven million agricultural workers in Africa since 1995 which has added to widespread food shortages in several countries.
Hunger and unemployment are also forcing more and more women and young girls into offering sex for food which is also contributing to the spread of HIV/Aids.
James Morris, executive director of WFP, recently told the UN Security Council that, "People are hungry because their governments have made the wrong political decisions.
"If
we are to make real progress against hunger in Africa - both chronic and in these
emergencies - difficult political choices will have to be made, both by African
states and traditional donor countries," he stressed.
"For the short term, we will need a major infusion of funds for humanitarian relief, and stronger and better co-operation from recipient governments; for the long term we will need reforms in governance and economic policy in Africa," Morris said.
Rose Mary Kaitamo is a Zimbabwean who has been living in London for a year. She sends money back home to support several orphans of cousins who have died of Aids.
"It is bad there at the moment," she says. "Terrible unemployment and no food in the shops. In particular, there is a shortage of mealie meal, our national food staple made from maize."
But she does not entirely blame the Zimbabwean government. "It is a more complex situation politically than UK newspapers report. Robert Mugabe has done bad things as a politician but also good things. He didn't want the West to leave Zimbabwe but something had to be done about the situation where someone like me was working in a company over there for one-quarter of the wage paid to a white worker doing the same job."
Likewise, she says, the cause of the food shortages is not simple. On the one hand, there was a government policy in the 90s to encourage farmers to grow lucrative cash crops for export like coffee and flowers rather than staples like maize, wheat and potatoes.
"But some of the shortage is effectively due to sabotage by the farmers. They have stockpiled maize in order to increase the price, and far more of them converted from staples to horticulture than the government intended. There's no money in growing food for the people."
Malawi, one of Africa's more densely populated countries, is blaming the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for the present food crisis because these international organisations have allegedly advised President Bakili Muluzi's government to sell maize stocks before the drought.
However, the IMF has not only denied such accusations, but has furthermore asked what has happened to the money received from the sale of the maize stocks.
Swaziland's King Mswati III is also faced with a tide of domestic and international criticism for buying a luxury jet for an estimated $45 million while only one tenth of that amount was earmarked for the national health budget for the year 2003.
In
a New Year's address to the nation, Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini has admitted
that the country's Aids prevalence rate has reached 38.6 per cent, which puts
Swaziland just behind Botswana for the highest Aids rate in the world. The latest
United Nations reports estimate that Botswana has a 38.8 per cent rate and Zimbabwe
33.7 per cent.
South Africa is not as affected by hunger as its neighbours, but President Thabo Mbeki's Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, was quoted in The Guardian as saying that South Africa could not afford anti-Aids drugs because it needed to spend the money to defend itself against potential aggressors.
Although she later said that her statement was "distorted", the Health Minister was immediately faced with a barrage of criticism from human rights and Aids activists. They said that the cost of one submarine could supply the estimated 400,000 affected South Africans with generic anti-Aids drugs for a period of two years.
The UN Secretary-General's special envoy on Aids, Stephen Lewis, has criticised the West's response to the humanitarian crisis in Africa caused by Aids and hunger as woefully inadequate, hypocritical and immoral.
Lewis commented that while people who contract HIV in developed countries could live for years, in Africa they are condemned to death.
"This, regrettably, results in death in Africa - Aids is tearing apart the heart of Africa," said Lewis. "We know there is a lot of money out there, we know there is plenty of food... but something must be profoundly wrong somewhere, something is morally wrong somewhere."
Apparently donor fatigue has gripped the West, and it is also evident that the US and UK are increasingly preoccupied with international terrorism and the looming war against Iraq.
Meanwhile, the WFP Deputy Executive Director, Jean-Jacques Graisse, has appealed to ordinary citizens around the world "to join the campaign and urge their governments to address the needs of the hungry now, before it is too late, before we have to endure the shame of seeing images of dying children on the news."
