By Patricia Lee Sharpe
When I left the U.S. for some elephant and lion watching in Tanzania with my grandson—that was the last week in July—the top news story on BBC and PBS was the drought in East Africa. These channels and others had turned themselves into ardent fund raisers for public and private charities seeking to alleviate the suffering and limit the deaths due to nature’s indifference to human welfare. The tactic: trying to shame non-African individuals and governments into giving much much more.
At the time, I found myself thinking that for every five minutes devoted to scenes of suffering five minutes, equally emotional, should have been devoted to exposing and re-exposing the human agents of human misery. Such thoughts were only partly prompted by Al Shebab’s callous refusal to allow aid workers access to starving refugees and others in territories under their control.
Three weeks later, it seems, these supposedly pious militants still prefer controlling lives to saving lives. But things aren’t much better in Mogadishu, apparently, where profiteers are selling sacks of grain intended for free distribution to the hungry and destitute. This blatant misappropriation could happen only with the collusion of at least some figures in the UN-backed Somali government, such as it is. Hardly the best way to keep the global charity pipeline flowing generously.
We have long known that the infamous Bengal famine during World War II didn’t have to happen. Winston Churchill, no lover of the “jewel in the crown,” refused to release the food stocks that would have saved millions of Indian lives. Studies of previous famines in East Africa and elsewhere have also shown that surplus food is usually available, somewhere, for a price. The real problem is that the poor are poor. Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, won a Nobel Prize for his studies of these dynamics.
Meanwhile, since today’s hungry do lack the money that’s needed to buy life-sustaining food, they starve to death. This is where global charities come in. Better yet, this is what good governments are prepared to deal with, especially in areas where drought occurs more or less frequently. Unfortunately good governance has been in fairly short supply in Africa.
When we landed in Tanzania three weeks ago, my grandson and I discovered that the savannah was drier than usual this dry season. Rivers were running abnormally low and water holes were shrinking or disappearing, but experts were confident that the animals that are so important to the country’s economy would survive pretty well until the rains arrive in December (if they come). As for the people in Tanzania, there’s no major crisis, so far, as there is in the northern parts of neighboring Kenya, in Turkana, especially. People there are drifting South, along with thousands of refugees from neighboring Ethiopia and Somalia. Kenya may be better off than much (if not most) of sub-Saharan Africa, but that doesn’t mean that the country has the surpluses that will enable it to deal with tens of thousands of extra mouths. International assistance is in order here.
Still, I was surprised and happy to see that at least some Kenyans are thinking in ways that would make Amartya Sen happy. As my grandson and I were waiting for our flight in the modest building that serves as Dar es Salaam’s terminal for bush planes, I managed to get my hands on a newspaper, that turned out to have been published in Nairobi. The article I want to tell you about was written by Kipchumba Some. It appeared in the Sunday Nation for July 31. Its headline: “Why Kenya’s food basket is nearly empty.”
Nature is one culprit, of course. Drought-induced desertification is affecting Kenya as well as other countries in the Sahel. Some three or four million Kenyans are at risk, according to a companion article, by Gakiha Weru, who writes, “The level of devastation in Turkana is evident from the air: hectare after hectare of sun-scorched earth.” Weru faults the government for not being prepared despite forecasts of drought from the Meteorological Department.
Were and Some, like Sen, contend that human action or inaction magnify the effects of drought disastrously. Population growth makes it increasingly hard for the land to feed everyone; unregulated urban development eats up arable land and traditional patterns of inheritance divide what remains into plots too small for anything but bare subsistence; farmers move out of staple crops like maize into commercial crops or orchards in order to achieve better profit margins; poor storage and primitive roads cause major crop wastage. And then there’s corruption: “The problem of famine relief in Turkana is compounded by local politics, with leaders fighting for control of the distribution to gain political mileage.”
All in all, according to a Member of Kenya’s Parliament still reeling from an encounter with herders whose cattle have been turned into dessicated carcasses, “What we are witnessing is not an act of God. It is something that we could have forestalled because we have the capacity....It is simply a question of moving food from one corner of the country to the next.”
For donors to feel happy about doubling or tripling their contributions to famine relief, they’ll need to see progress in overcoming the human causes of food insufficiency. They’ll need to see more Africans taking responsibility for the welfare of Africans. This probably requires a new breed of leaders, and a citizenry who will be satisfied with nothing less. The good news is that this seems to be happening, here and there. The bad news is that it isn't happening fast enough or broadly enough.