A Harvest of Despair

The world's hungriest continent reels under a new famine

After the famine that killed an estimated quarter of a million people in West Africa in the early '70s, the 36-member United Nations World Food Council vowed to create a world without hunger within a decade. Today that ambitious goal seems more distant than ever. Over the decade. Africa has become the world's hungriest continent. Food production has increased by about 1% a year, while its population has grown nearly three times as quickly, from an estimated 350 million to 470 million. Of the 29 countries classified by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as suffering from "abnormal food shortages"--a euphemism for widespread famine--23 are in Africa. West Africa still suffers from chronic drought, but the deadly hunger there has been brought under control with emergency food supplies from developed nations. But now famine has struck again, this time in East Africa. TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Jack White reports:

From the sandy beaches on the Red Sea coast to the rolling hills of Zimbabwe, scenes of hunger and despair have become a terrible norm across a vast body of land encompassing parts of twelve countries and exceeding in size all of Western Europe. In northwestern Kenya, forlorn Turkana tribesmen trek for miles through the bush to Catholic missions in Kakuma and Lodwar, where emergency food is distributed. In the strife-torn Karamoja province of northeastern Uganda, relief workers wake every morning to find the corpses of malnourished children deposited on their doorsteps. In the Horn of Africa, more than 1.7 million refugees from the unresolved conflicts in Ethiopia's Eritrea, Tigre and Ogaden areas swelter in squalid relief camps, where thousands have already died from malnutrition and a host of hunger-related diseases.

The situation is not likely to improve in the near future. The FAO warns that "unfavorable crop conditions" now prevail in almost every nation in East Africa and that without massive infusions of outside aid, several million East Africans may starve; thousands are dying every day. Says Robert Kitchen, a United Nations official in Nairobi: "From the Red Sea south, this area is on a collision course with disaster."

The tragedy is in part the result of drought. For the past two years, the normally dependable rains that usually begin in March have arrived behind schedule--or not at all. This has disrupted planting from Somalia to Mozambique. In Kenya, a six-week delay in the rainy season contributed to a decline in milk production from 700,000 liters to 400,000 liters a day; milk, butter and baby formula virtually disappeared from, the stores.

Human failings have been even more detrimental. In Kenya, says a U.N. expert, "90% of the trouble comes from bad marketing policies." Following a bumper crop of corn in 1978, the Kenya government overconfidently slashed prices paid to farmers by nearly 30% and sold more than 200,000 tons of grain on the export market. It also agreed to supply 8,000 tons of emergency food to Uganda, where the harvest had been destroyed during the chaos of Tanzania's war against Idi Amin. When last year's cereal crop fell short by 400,000 tons, largely because farmers stopped planting, the country cut off the shipments to Uganda after supplying only 80 tons, and was forced to buy heavily on international grain markets after accepting a U.S. donation of 60,000 tons. In Tanzania, the lack of modern storage facilities forced the government to export 259,000 tons of grain and other food stuffs last year--almost enough to cover the 280,000-ton shortfall it expects in 1980.

The natural and man-made factors have combined most disastrously in Karamoja, a Vermont-sized rangeland in Uganda 200 miles northeast of Kampala. Since the downfall of Amin last year, Karamoja has turned into a surrealistic terror, as heavily armed marauders led by remnants of the fallen dictator's army swoop down on villages in search of food. While stealing it, they often kill every man, woman and child in sight. After almost a dozen relief workers were murdered, CARE and other agencies considered suspending their operations until some semblance of order could be restored. The troops dispatched to the area by the post-Amin regime have often joined in the attacks on the local populace. In late May, Tanzanian soldiers barged into the Catholic hospital in Abim, dragged away five patients, including a six-year-old boy, and shot them to death outside the hospital gate. A week later, Ugandan troops invaded the hospital and killed five staff members. The famine in Karamoja has broken down all sense of humanity and cooperation among the local people. Relief workers watched recently as adult men snatched chunks of meat out of the mouths of children gathered around the bony carcass of a freshly slaughtered cow. Says a missionary: "This is a microcosm of everything that can go wrong in Africa: no food, no security, no medicine. And it can only get worse."

What is needed is a complete overhaul of food production systems in the region: irrigation networks to increase the harvests, modern silos in areas like Tanzania to store the surplus, and better distribution methods to get the food to those who need it. But even if these ambitious plans are vigorously carried out, they cannot save the multitudes that are starving now. Says an FAO food expert: "No matter what we do now, millions will die." Adds World Food Council Executive Director Maurice Williams: "I wish I could say I had hope for the future, but I fear that we are headed for a period of permanent food crisis in Africa." -

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