Three Famines (25 page)

In the closed society of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, a famine that was triggered in 1995 first by drought and then by catastrophic floods - but also by the loss of manufacturing and other contracts with Russia - would go on to kill perhaps one million people. At least, that is the figure given by most experts, but being an expert on North Korea is a hard exercise.

Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, cited the floods as his reason to call for aid. He was, like Mengistu before him, suspicious of Western aid bodies, because he believed that aid was an extension of American politics. It is hard to agree in any form with Kim Jong Il, but the reality is that aid is coloured by politics, and the enthusiasm of religious aid organisations - as pure as their intentions might be - to take part in relief in such an extremely Stalinist, God-denying nation, could be seen as a proof that both ideology and the Cross followed the bags of emergency food. For these reasons, and because he could not let the West see that his governance had failed his people, Kim did not let international agencies
carry out any research into the level of malnutrition in North Korea, the size of the threatened population, or the mortality rate among them.

There were complaints by agencies that food resulting from their aid went to the favoured and the army. As in Ethiopia earlier, the death rate certainly confirmed the fact that aid was not reaching all those who needed it. In fact, in 1997, to strengthen the support of the military for his regime, Kim frankly put in place a
songun
, or a ‘military-first’ policy.

Though the end date of the country’s famine is generally given as 1998, some argue it has never ended. The famine cycle there is said to have become nearly intractable – the soil is eroded by over-farming in Stalin and Mengistu-style collectives, and people have been taken away from farming for the sort of great industrial surges favoured by Stalin and Mao. Acceptance of a two-meal-a-day policy has become one of the standards of loyalty to
juche
, the philosophy by which Kim Jong Il’s edicts are the driving force in individual choice. But because of the highly secretive nature of the country, and despite the window that NGOs opened on it during the official famine, North Korea remains a place where another million or more could die, and news of it would remain as obscure a rumour as might a famine in a distant kingdom in the Middle Ages.

Meles Zenawi, the pragmatic Marxist leader of the Tigrayan rebels who became prime minister of Ethiopia in 1991, has, since then, been faced with many food emergencies, most of
whose existence he has denied. It seems that there is a virus in Ethiopian government that transfers itself from regime to regime. Ethiopians who have left their country ask why the Ethiopian government fails to put in place permanent policies to reduce emergencies brought on by drought. And both domestic Ethiopia and Ethiopia dispersed point to the great agricultural companies of the world for charging high for seed and paying low for product.

Like the Irish, the chief and unqualified aid the Ethiopians overseas remitted home was money for their families, and that was enormous in scale, flowing from cab drivers and parking-station attendants, storekeepers and professionals all over the earth.

By 2008, the bulk of employment in Ethiopia was in its bureaucracy, and members of opposition parties had been imprisoned and tortured. In 2003, according to the
New York Times
, more than 12 million were at risk from famine in Ethiopia, half of them children under fifteen years. More recently UNICEF has said that 8 million Ethiopians are ‘chronically food insecure’, an unnecessary bureaucratic term, which conveys the reality that farming families do not produce enough to avoid being hungry and malnourished. At least 3.4 million of these were in immediate need of emergency food relief. Yet, like Mengistu, President Meles Zenawi told the National Assembly in March 2008 that reports of drought-induced deaths were false, denied that pastoralists in the south were losing livestock to drought, or that malnutrition was anything near the levels foreign aid workers claimed. Accusations were made, too, that Zenawi had stood in the way of the flow of relief by charging excessive fees for
transportation, and limiting the means of distribution to a trucking company in which he was accused of having interests. Like Mengistu, he was vigilant to punish any aid agency who tried to take a political stance on freedom of expression and other rights. Photographs of the starving were banned, and aid workers in the field were told not to give interviews to foreign journalists.

In August 2008, Zenawi said that UNICEF’s estimations of the numbers at risk were overblown. He was skilled at using the new cynicism about relief to his advantage. ‘The more gruesome the picture, the better chance you have of getting your share of those resources.’ In an interview, Zenawi assured those who questioned him that the Ogaden was being looked after adequately and with the same level of care as other provinces. ‘I suspect we will always have pockets of hunger. The big question is whether we have enough in our own economy to be able to finance the safety net program. We have not reached that stage yet.’

When this interview was posted on an Ethiopian news site on the internet, the focus of Ethiopians who responded was chiefly on getting rid of Zenawi, although one Tigrayan read the criticism as part of the hatred of his ethnic group by Amharas in exile.

Zenawi’s famine existed not only in the countryside but also among the slum dwellers of the city. As one woman said, ‘We give birth to the children, but we can’t grow them.’ In 2008, malnourished children were being brought to feeding clinics. It was not uncommon for four-year-old children who weighed twenty pounds to appear at the field hospitals. They were weighed in a nylon harness attached to a scale and
their arm circumference was measured. Those most under-nourished were kept in the clinic for up to a month, and the rest went home with a week’s supply of Plumpy-nut, a nutritional paste. This high-protein mixture of peanut paste, vegetable oil, powdered milk, powdered sugar, vitamins and minerals was designed in 1999 by André Briend, a French scientist. It was manufactured in France and packed in silver foil designed to resist the effects of heat and distance. In the early twenty-first century, Plumpy-nut has become what the high-protein biscuit, otherwise known as BP-5, had been in late-twentieth-century food crises.

The poor of 2006 had to eat
injera
made of sorghum or rice instead of teff, and found these alternatives in many cases too harsh on the stomach, sometimes with fatal effects.

In 2002, Zenawi
had
acknowledged an Ethiopian crisis, in which 6 million people were in need of assistance, with another 2 to 3 million likely to be stricken in the coming months. Though fortunately averted by emergency aid, this threat had the potential to be worse than Mengistu’s famine.

In that same year, half a million people were under threat of starvation in Mozambique. And in Malawi, where there had already been a terrible famine in 1949–50, 3.2 million people were threatened by famine. In the earlier Malawi crisis of 1949, men had taken to the roads, obsessed with getting food. ‘People could not stay in one place,’ said a witness. ‘If they heard there was food somewhere they went to find it, no matter how far.’ They travelled to the large towns of Ntcheu, Neno and Mwanza to work in the gardens of people who had plenty of food. Men who had come from elsewhere to marry in a particular region sometimes abandoned their wives
and went back to their parents’ home, supposedly to look for food – however, many, wanting to be free from encumbrances in this crisis, never came back again.

All the other debasements of that 1949–50 famine that occurred in Malawi arose again in Biafra in the newly independent Nigeria. In 1960, the country was a loose confederacy of ethnic groups: the Hausa and Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the south-west and the Ibo in the south-east. The Ibo and the Hausas were enemies, and up to 30,000 Ibos were killed in conflict between the two groups. About 1 million panicked refugees from other parts of the country fled to their Ibo homeland in the east, where Colonel Emeka Ojukwu declared the independent republic of Biafra in May 1967. Two and a half years later, one million civilians had died in fighting with the Hausa and from famine. The Biafran famine was a media event as well as a tragedy – the first great famine to be covered by the new medium of television.

In Zimbabwe, as I write, there is a growing famine crisis. Because of the leader Robert Mugabe’s new land policies, farms have fallen into disuse and the price of food, where it can be found in the markets and on the largely empty shelves of grocery stores, is rising every week, not simply by percentages but by multiples. In mismanaged Angola and Mauritania, in a relentless drought, an uncounted number of endangered people await help. In the landlocked state of Zambia, some hundreds of thousands are at risk, but the president has refused to accept genetically modified food, off-loaded from the West, to feed them. Agribusiness from the West is seen both as a plunderer of African seed varieties for use for its own commercial purposes, and as forcing
genetically modified food strains upon native populations. This food, for which demand in the West is uncertain, is increasingly sent as food aid to Africa.

Darfur is a western province of the Sudan, situated in a pitiless desert that stretches away to and beyond the borders of Chad. Malnutrition levels, particularly among children, are very high there, but relief agencies find it hard to work under threats from the central government that they will be thrown out at any time. The flow of food from Khartoum, the capital, is so intruded upon by bureaucrats that one German agency shipped its food in via West Africa and the republic of Chad.

The Janjaweed Arab militias, armed by the central government, keep African farmers from cultivating their land and destroy before harvest whatever crops are planted. Reports of a collapse in cultivation of crops, due to people being driven off their land by the Janjaweed and Sudanese government soldiers, are universal throughout the province. Increasing numbers of Darfur people have fled to refugee camps, and in 2008 more than 3 million were dependent on food assistance.

The Global Acute Malnutrition index showed a rate of 21.3 per cent for malnutrition among children in 2007, but Khartoum blocked further testing and the Wali or administrator of north Darfur took on himself the right to censor any malnutrition studies before their release. In 2006, for lack of funding, the World Food program announced that it would cut the rations to Darfur from 1300 calories a day to 1050. This is half the minimum daily calories necessary to maintain health. The program said the problem was it had received just a third of the money it had requested from donor countries.

The Darfur rebels, for whose existence the government is persecuting an entire population, call themselves the Justice and Equality Movement – JEM. JEM was founded by former supporters, now disenchanted, of the Islamic leader of Sudan, Hassan al-Turabi, who is also leader of the opposition. In its pursuit of JEM the army is relentless. On BBC television, a Sudanese army deserter told of a standard military operation in Darfur, aimed not only on the plunder or destruction of crops, but involving orders from officers to kill adult women and rape and kill thirteen-and fourteen-year-old girls – all of them were, in the army’s eyes, culpable of supporting rebel groups.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Darfur was an example of the way armies, militias, race and government policy combined to create what the experts call ‘a humanitarian disaster’.

African famines, especially, have become more complex and difficult to deal with since now they often involve people suffering from AIDS. As well as that, the seasons are becoming more erratic as the climate warms. Arguments about relief and its efficacy continue. And in a modern world where the keeping of statistics is an obsession, the attempted secrecy of regimes, their power to permit relief to penetrate their country only to a certain degree, the existence of rebel groups and the appalling state of infrastructure guarantee that many die beyond view. It still remains impossible, therefore, to number the famine dead. Above all, there is no end to politicians who
pursue, at the cost of all compassion and paying the price of human flesh, their denials, dogmas and ideologies.

Despite seasons of neediness continuing, famine did not return to Ireland after the 1840s, whereas it seems set for tragic repetitions in Ethiopia, and is not done with yet. Ideology might have played a large part in the Irish and Bengal famines. But, according to the distinguished economic historian Cormac Ó’Gráda, in Ethiopia and in many food crises of the present and recent past, it is oppression, war and ‘civic mayhem’ that have been the main reasons for famine mortality. ‘Agency,’ he says, ‘is more important than a food production shortfall. Mars counts for more than Malthus.’

Surely, then, famine has not had its last ride.

BOOKS

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ARTICLES

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Daedalus
, Volume 129, 2000

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, Volume 50, 2008