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.
Bibliography
BOOKS
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van Apeldoorn, G. Jan, Perspectives on Famine and Drought in Nigeria (London, 1981)
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atrick, Liberty or Death, India’s Journey to Independence and Division (London, 1997)
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ARTICLES
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Kuma, Gupalakrishna, ‘Ethiopian Famines, 1973-1985’, World Institute for Development Economics, Working Paper 26, November 1987
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Lorgan, Christy Cannon, ‘The Experience of Villagisation: Lessons from Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania’, Oxfam, Great Britain, January 1999
Ó’Gráda, Cormac, ‘A Demography of Famine: an Indian Historical Perspective’, Journal of Development Studies, December 1997
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Index of Searchable Terms
Abate, Colonel Atnafu
Acheson, Dean
Addis Ababa
Adedeji, Adebayo
Adowa
Aeolus
Afar, the
Afar Liberation Front
Afeworki, Issayas
African famines
agribusiness, Western
aid see relief
al-Mahdi, Sadiq
al-Turabi, Hassan
All-Ethiopia Peasants’ Association
All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement
All-Ethiopia Urban Dwellers’
Association
Allenby, Sir Edmund
aman
Amba
resettlement site
amenorrhoea
American Red Cross
American Relief Administration (ARA)
Amery, Leopold
Amrita Bazar Patrika
an Gorta Mór
Board of Guardians
Board of Temporary Relief
cannibalism
Catholic appeal for aid
corn/maize importation
deaths
dysentery
emigration
evictions
exports of foodstuffs
family separation
family survival
fishing and
food riots
foreign aid
grain export during
Gregory-ism
informers
min dèirce
newspaper coverage
Poor Law system
population decline
potato blight
prostitution
Protestantism, conversion to
public works scheme
relief
Relief Commission
reports of
resistance
‘rural outrages’
soup kitchens
‘souperism’
theft
transportation
trigger
whistleblowers
workhouses
Andom, Aman
Angola
anorexia nervosa
Anuak, the
Aseb
Asfaw, Legesse
Asmara
Asosa resettlement camp
Assam
Auchinleck, General Claude
aus
Australia
Bajpai, Sir Girja
Bale
Ballinakill
Ballinglass
Ballykilcline
Band Aid
Bangladesh
Banti, Teferi
Barakpur
Barre, Mohamed Siad
Barry, Marion
Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch
BBC
Belafonte, Harry
Belfast
Bengal
annual rainfall
bargadars
Three Famines Page 25