Nadine Hutton/International Federation, Swaziland

Chapter 3 - summary
Famine stalks southern Africa

By early 2003, 15 million people were threatened with starvation across southern Africa. Yet the first evidence of a looming crisis emerged in mid-2001. Despite warnings from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in autumn 2001, the region’s governments initially denied the emergency existed and for nine months donors delayed their responses

By mid-2002, over 1,000 people in Malawi alone had already died from starvation and cholera – aggravated by hunger – without counting the impact of HIV/AIDS. These deaths could have been averted. Were the early warnings ignored or just plain wrong?

Three vulnerability mapping systems were in use during 2001-02: USAID’s FEWSNET, which focuses on satellite data; Food and Agriculture Organization/World Food Programme assessments, which focus on area-wide food production and availability; and the Save the Children Fund (SCF) assessment, the only method to analyse vulnerable people’s access to food and the role household assets play in coping with drought or flood.

During mid-2001, FEWSNET reported that, while Malawi’s maize production would drop by one-third, a healthy crop of tubers would compensate. This over-optimistic estimate helped delay donor responses. However, SCF’s analysis in late 2001 revealed that maize prices had risen by 340 per cent, production had fallen by 40 per cent and the poorest were already out of food. SCF argued the food crisis was nationwide, but they were accused of exaggeration.

Only when SCF reported that malnutrition had doubled in some districts to 19 per cent did United Nations agencies and the Malawian government react. Even then, some donors delayed releasing funds until July 2002. Strengthening national food security and livelihood surveillance systems and improving donor coordination over shared early warning are vital to avert future famine.

The food crisis has been compounded by HIV/AIDS, which is killing hundreds of thousands of southern Africans. The pandemic has gripped the region for over a decade – yet despite three years of food insecurity, the political and financial will to tackle this complex emergency appears to be absent.

HIV prevalence rates range from 15 per cent in Malawi to 33 per cent in Zimbabwe. The continent is home to three-quarters of the world’s 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Hunger fuels the pandemic. Nutritious food helps people with HIV live longer and healthier; lack of it quickens the pace of disease. Destitution and desperation lead to high-risk behaviour, such as exchanging sex for food or money.

As AIDS kills mostly young adults, families lose the labour, income and skills of their most productive members. One AIDS-related adult death in a Zimbabwean farming household reduces the maize crop by 60 per cent. In Malawi, HIV/AIDS has reduced life expectancy from 46 to 36 years.

To pay for health care and funerals, families sell assets. Children drop out of school to do housework, nurse the sick and earn money. Orphans are so numerous – 800,000 in Zimbabwe, 470,000 in Malawi – that the extended family cannot care for them. The social fabric is stretched to breaking point. Although the crop failure in 1992, during the worst drought in living memory, was far more severe, Malawians coped. Ten years on, the combination of HIV/AIDS, acute impoverishment and crop failure has brought disaster.

The lethal mix of AIDS, poverty and hunger is forcing aid agencies into an extreme learning curve, demolishing the artificial compartments of emergency, recovery and development. AIDS is both a root cause of poverty and its consequence. Is it morally tenable any longer for relief agencies to deal with this humanitarian disaster without addressing its causes?

Politics have been another factor in southern Africa’s food crisis. But most international aid agencies have avoided criticizing the region’s authorities directly. In Malawi, the government’s sale of the entire grain reserve, shortly before the famine took hold, remains contentious, with the cash raised from the sale still unaccounted for. In Zimbabwe, President Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party has been accused of starving its political opponents and feeding its supporters.

By early 2003, 7 million Zimbabweans – more than half the population – needed food aid. Chaotic land seizures have destroyed commercial agriculture and a dry spell in 2002 compounded the disaster. Annual inflation is 180 per cent. Cereal production has dropped by two-thirds. One in three adults is HIV-positive.

The government denied the food crisis until after the violent presidential election of March 2002, which returned Mugabe to power. According to international reports, ZANU-PF has politicized the famine by denying opposition supporters access to food aid, allowing party allies to profit from re-selling cheap government maize at inflated black-market prices, and obstructing the operations of aid agencies.

In December 2002, the Food Security Network (FOSENET) – a consortium of 24 Zimbabwean NGOs ––documented the political manipulation of food aid and governmental grain supplies in 38 per cent of districts surveyed. FOSENET called on all NGOs and the UN to act in solidarity, when faced with government interference, but the idea did not prosper. According to the International Crisis Group: “In Zimbabwe, the UN’s weak leadership compromised aid agencies’ ability to get assistance to those in need.” So the protest is left to Zimbabwean activists, who put their livelihoods, security and families at risk. Several – including church leaders – have been arrested and tortured.

In such an operating environment, how far should aid agencies go in insisting on universal humanitarian principles? In autumn 2002, all SCF operations – including vital food aid to over 150,000 vulnerable people in the Zambezi valley – were suspended by the government, as the district had voted largely for the opposition during elections, and SCF was suspected of politicizing food aid to swing votes.

While human rights activists urged the agency to adopt an openly critical stance towards the government for withholding the human rights of hungry people to food aid, SCF chose a more discreet path. They argued that no other agencies could feed this population as efficiently as themselves, so they preferred to negotiate a speedy settlement with the authorities, rather than jeopardize food deliveries to the hungry through moral confrontation.

After seven weeks of aid being suspended, SCF signed a new agreement with the government and programmes resumed. The agreement included the four core operating principles that had guided SCF's interventions since 2001:

• Impartiality:need is the sole criterion of targeting.
• Proper attribution:aid must not be used to encourage a political standpoint.
• Neutrality:aid must be provided with no political intent by SCF.
• Safety of humanitarian personnel:to be guaranteed by the authorities.

One shortcoming of humanitarian organizations working in Zimbabwe has been the failure to form a unified position in relation to key operating principles. An agreed code of conduct between agencies, donors, the Zimbabwe government and the UN - which would help define the parameters and principles of collective relief operations - should be negotiated.

Principal contributors to this chapter were SCF's Anna Jefferys and Chris McIvor; Jonathan Walter, editor of the World Disasters Report; and freelance writer Mercedes Sayagues, who also wrote the box.