Famine Casts Its Grim Global Shadow

Girdling the world at its equatorial bulge is a belt of hunger. Above it live the 1.4 billion inhabitants of the northern developed nations whose advanced industry and agriculture permit them the luxury of worrying about reducing diets instead of diet deficiencies. Below it are the potentially prosperous lands of the Southern Hemisphere's temperate zone. Along the belt live many of the 2.5 billion citizens of the underdeveloped world, nearly all of them ill-fed: at least 60% are malnourished, and 20% more are starving.

Today, famine is rampant in Ethiopia, the African nations of the Sahel (Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Upper Volta), Gambia and in areas of Tanzania and Kenya. Near famine also plagues Bolivia, Syria, Yemen and Nigeria. One poor harvest could bring massive hunger to India, the Sudan, Guyana, Somalia, Guinea and Zaire. In two dozen other nations, the populace faces chronic food shortages. Among them: Bangladesh, Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines and Haiti.

Bountiful Days. Gone are the bountiful days of the 1960s, when the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization worried about how to dispose of a glut of food, and the U.S. Government paid its farmers not to plant crops. Now the world's food reserves are at their lowest since World War II, amounting to a mere 27 days of consumption. "We're just keeping our heads above water," observes FAO Official John Mollett. "But the margin of safety is decreasing. One big crop failure anywhere and it could be every country for itself." For most countries in the hunger belt, that could mean mass starvation.

In the Sahel, that time has already come. For the past six years, the 25 million farmers and nomads fatalistically accepted each dry season, expecting that rains would soon follow. They never did. Crops withered, grazing land turned barren, and lakes and wells dried up. Many Africans became so hungry that they ate their breeding cattle and seed grain, thus condemning themselves to total dependence on outside help. Unless they receive aid, they will be unable to plant new crops or raise new herds even if the rains do come. The Sahel's flat savannas, which once supported the blue-and black-robed Tuareg and Fulani warriors, are now empty, save for the thousands of reddish brown mounds that mark the graves of those who starved. At least 100,000 have died.

Shantytown refugee camps have risen like festering sores throughout the region, providing the barest relief to half a million people. Their individual monthly ration is only 26 Ibs. of flour and 4.4 Ibs. of dried milk, the nutritional equivalent of about one-third of the average American's diet. In their weakened condition, disease has spread quickly. Typhus, dysentery, measles and gastroenteritis are rampant. At the teeming Lazaret camp near Niamey, Niger's capital, cholera threatens the 15,000 refugees. In Chad, some emaciated nomads begged a U.N. official not to send them medicines, pleading that death from diphtheria was quicker and hence easier than the slower death from starvation.

The drought has claimed an equally grim toll in parts of Ethiopia. Provincial bureaucrats kept the horrific dimensions of the catastrophe secret from Addis Ababa, fearing that bad news would anger and embarrass Emperor Haile Selassie and perhaps lead to their own dismissal. Finally, last spring, the number of deaths grew so great that the bureaucrats had to admit their existence and ask for international aid. At first the drought seemed confined to eastern Ethiopia. But a new government survey uncovered big pockets of famine to the south and southeast of the capital. In Bale province alone an estimated 27,000 cattle, 25,000 sheep and goats and 500 camels have died. This study only hints at the true extent of Ethiopia's problems. Remarked an Ethiopian relief worker: "The farther east you go, the worse it gets." Ethiopian deaths are estimated at 100,000, but no one knows definitely because there are no reliable population records.

Drought is not the only enemy. Rain can be just as devastating. When the spring rains came to Ethiopia this March, they broke all known records. Ten inches fell in some sections in three days (compared with one-tenth inch last spring). The torrents washed away vital crops and thousands of tons of top soil. In Wallo province, worst hit by the famine, the deluge swept away villages and roads, overturned supply trucks and dangerously delayed relief efforts.

Conspicuous Absence. An emergency worldwide aid program was launched last year and has already saved more than 1 million Africans from starvation. Private and national agencies, coordinated by the FAO, delivered about 518,000 tons of grain to the Sahel and Ethiopia. This year 770,000 tons have been pledged, nearly half of it by the U.S. and significant amounts by the Common Market, Canada, the Soviet Union, Sweden and China. Conspicuously absent from the ranks of the generous are the newly rich Middle East oil exporters. So far they have contributed less than 1% of the total aid.

Though the aid has been lifesaving, it has not been as effectively used as it could be. Inefficiency and corruption of local bureaucrats have slowed the distribution of the emergency supplies. In Mali and Niger, officials have diverted some of the donated grain to commercial channels for sale at enormous profits. Much of the donated food remains heaped high on the docks where it is prey to rats, locusts and thieves. The major problem, however, is logistics. U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, after inspecting the famine areas in February, reported: "I saw piles of foodstuffs in the capitals of the drought-stricken countries, but the governments told me they cannot ship it to the areas most afflicted. Because of the lack of roads--it is just sand, everywhere you look you have sand--after a relatively short time, the trucks are not usable any more."

Donkey Caravans. With almost all of the drought area far away from the few railways, navigable rivers and paved roads, relief trucks have had to crawl along sand and dirt paths in desert heat. In Ethiopia, some of the neediest areas are so deep in the countryside that only caravans of donkeys and camels have been able to reach them.

The weather is a continuing threat. Rains, if they come at all this year, are due to arrive in mid-June. They could transform the dusty Sahel into a muddy bog, making vehicle traffic impossible. FAO officials had hoped that most of this year's aid would be prepositioned in remote regions by June. However, red tape and a lack of urgency by the donor countries made shipments late. Most of the grains should have arrived at African ports by March, but only 266,000 tons had been received by April. An additional 170,500 tons arrived last month, and 333,000 tons are still due. Even without local inefficiencies, it now will be difficult to get the food into the needy areas before the rains.

When the world first discovered the dimensions of the crisis last year, there was no time to truck in most of the supplies. The FAO mobilized an airlift costing more than $30 million or nearly half of what the food was worth. Now FAO chiefs fear that an airlift may again be needed. But increased fuel prices could double the cost of the operation, a cost that the FAO may find the donors unwilling to underwrite.

Even if this year's relief effort forestalls mass starvation, the long-term outlook for Africa's hunger belt is at best grim. A ministerial-level committee of the Sahelian nations is seeking foreign grants of $700 million to fund 126 long-range projects, such as dams, reforestation, transport networks and rebuilding of decimated herds. But the only certain means of guaranteeing that the present catastrophe will not repeat itself lies with population control rather than with food supplies.

Every day the world's population jumps 200,000 persons--or some 75 million per year. By the end of the century, it could total 7 billion--up from the present 4 billion. To feed these new mouths, the world must produce an additional 30 million tons of food each year--an increase of at least 2.5%--just to maintain present per capita consumption levels. For the developing countries, that is like walking on a treadmill. Although the African nations in the hunger belt have boosted their food production 22% since the early 1960s, per capita consumption has actually fallen 5% because of increased population. By contrast, Americans during the same period went from eating 118% of their basic energy requirements (in terms of protein) to 123%, Soviets and East Europeans from 116% to 126%, and China from 86% to 100%.

The lines on the Malthusian chart are ominous: if the present birthrate continues, someday--perhaps as early as 2025--there will be more people than the earth can feed, given its present technology. Photos by earth satellites reveal that the world's most productive land is already cultivated, convenient water sources already tapped and nearly all grazing capacity already in use. Marine biologists worry that the sea, once regarded as a nearly unlimited source of cheap protein, has been overfished. To bring marginal farmland into use round the world would require a massive investment beyond the means of the underdeveloped nations and probably beyond the generosity or administrative cooperation of the developed nations.

The "Green Revolution," which only a few years ago brought hope of agricultural self-sufficiency to India and other countries of Asia, has already lost much of its promise. The increase in oil prices has nearly trebled the cost of nitrogen fertilizers and of fuel for irrigation pumps upon which the crops of high-yield rice and wheat rely. Hundreds of thousands of Asia's small farmers who once enthusiastically sowed their fields with the Green Revolution's hybrid strains are now reverting to more traditional methods of cultivation. The harvests are smaller but much less dependent on fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation.

One Meager Meal. India, which had been one of the major success stories of the Green Revolution, is now seeking commodity aid from the U.S. because inadequate rains coupled with fertilizer shortages reduced recent harvests. With perhaps half of its 600 million people living at or below the subsistence level --eating no more than one meager meal daily--even a slight drop in food production can have an enormous impact. If drought returns to India this year, tens of millions of lives will be threatened.

Some climatologists believe that the earth is experiencing a basic change in its weather, which could cause prolonged droughts throughout the hunger belt. About ten years ago, scientists began noting that the high-altitude winds that ring the North Pole have shifted south, changing weather patterns throughout the world. Part of India's monsoon rains are now dropping uselessly into the ocean. In the past six years, the Sahara has expanded 100 miles southward in some places. Scientists are baffled by the phenomenon, but some suspect it may be caused by sun spots or increased carbon dioxide and dust in the atmosphere, or a combination of both.

If vast parts of the globe are actually doomed to such drastic weather changes, then the outlook is bleak indeed. Political unrest and even civil wars will become more likely as whole countries go hungry. In the past year, discontent spurred by food shortages contributed to the sudden changes of government in Niger and Thailand, and it threatens the reign of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia.

Only long-range multinational planning can cope with the problem. For example, there could be a United Nations-sponsored international birth control program, an expansion of fertilizer production, and the storing of adequate food reserves as a buffer against periodic poor harvests. Members of the United Nations hope to consider those proposals when they gather in Bucharest during August for a conference on population, and in Rome in November for a conference on food. Their task is formidable. Between now and the time they begin their deliberations, the world's population will have increased by 30 million.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.