Aiding who?

Imagine. You're an international humanitarian aid worker in a war zone and faithful to the principle of the Red Cross, as any good humanitarian should be. In other words, you're impartial neutral and independent. it's your responsibility to relive human suffering , irrespective of the people involved and the situation on the ground. You do what you can for the victims, but soldiers exploit your efforts. The demand money for every well you dig and levy sky-high taxes, thought up on the sport, on all the sacks of rice and tents and medicine you arrange to have flown in. They consume a slice of your aid supplies and sell another slice.  Among the items they buy with the proceeds are weapons, which they use to drive yet more people into your refugee camp or even to their death. What do you do?

In Somalia al-Shabab, considered a "terrorist" group by the US, sought to control aid agencies through a system of regulation, taxation and surveillance. Aid groups were forced to pay as much as $10,000 to 'register' their work. They would then have to disclose project details, their budgets and even staff members' names. They were sometimes forced to pay so-called additional 'taxes', and in many cases al-Shabab insisted on distributing aid, and kept much of it for themselves. Aid agencies have to make deals and accept unpalatable conditions from all sides just to function, and at times simply to survive. That means they sometimes end up paying the ransom that armed groups demand. But the alternative is to do nothing, and see many more people suffer and die.

“The al-Shabab group had set up a government, they had policies around there. They had a humanitarian coordinating office. They are acting as a local authority. And we negotiate with them.” explained Marc Dubois, executive director, Doctors without Borders

"These famines, particularly war-caused famines, are amazingly good opportunities for fundraising. If you [as an aid agency] can get your logo there and say we are helping out, your funds will just go through the roof ...I am just very suspicious about aid agencies who make huge claims for what they are doing without mentioning this dark side, the difficult side, where they know may be 20 to 30 percent or 40 percent or more perhaps is actually being siphoned off - may be spent on guns, will be spent on war - and they have to accept that. I think the only option is to be completely open about it." said Richard Dowden, director at the Royal African Society

Nor is it only the terrorist groups that take advantage of aid organisations.  In the weeks before the al-Qaeda leader was killed, the CIA told a Pakistani doctor to set up a fake vaccination scheme in the town of Abbottabad so they could try to gain access to Bin Laden's house. When news got out it cast doubt on the integrity of aid workers in general, 200 US aid groups wrote to the CIA blaming the ploy for a polio crisis in Pakistan. Since then at least one aid group, Save the Children, has had to pull out their staff because of concerns over their safety.

From AlJazeera

Less aid for the Congo

The UN World Food Program (WFP) said  that it has raised only 25 percent of its USD 478 million plan to feed 4.2 million people in Congo through December 2015. 

The agency has already been forced to reduce half of its food rations to people in North Kivu Province in eastern Congo, affecting 300,000 internally-displaced people. 

Without additional funds, the WFP will be “forced to start a significant down-scale of activities in the provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Equateur, Kasai and Orientale,” said agency spokesperson Elisabeth Byrs, adding that the reduction will hurt school children, refugees and people in food-for-work programs.

 One out of every 10 children in the country suffers from acute malnutrition, with about 10 percent of the people facing hunger and needing food assistance, the agency said. 

Congo has witnessed numerous problems over the past few decades, such as grinding poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and a war in the east of the country that has dragged on since 1998 and left over 5.5 million people dead. 

Since early May 2012, nearly three million people have fled their homes in the eastern Congo. About 2.5 million resettled in Congo, but about 500,000 crossed into neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. 

trust in the $

"More than one in four Africans—close to 218 million people—is undernourished" the UN Development Progam declared in a recent report.

What's the answer?

According to  Obama and  the G-8 the solution is the private sector. Cargill, Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and Yara; and junk-food behemoths Unilever, Kraft, Hershey’s, and Mars. $2 billion of the total $3 billion in pledged investments will come in the form of a single "world-class fertilizer production facility" planned by the Norwegian company Yara, the globe's largest nitrogen-fertilizer company.

 Corporations are accountable to their shareholders, They are obliged and bound by law to make a profit. They are not charities. To be recipients of this aid African governments had to agree to "refine policies in order to improve investment opportunities," an echo of the old IMF agreements that forced countries to open their food markets to foreign competition in order to qualify for loans.

Some of the major partners in this "alliance" are dubious and have proven track records of self-interest.

 Monsanto has aggressively marketed its premium-priced, patented Bt cotton seeds to small scale farmers, to the point where in swaths of the country, no other cotton seeds are available, according to a report from New York University Law School's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. Results have been disastrous: at least 17,775 farmers committed suicide between 2002 and 2009. There, Bt cotton crops generated  much lower yields than non-Bt cotton crops for smallholder farmers during years with drought. The use of Bt cottonseed, contrary to advertising, also failed to reduce pesticide usage for many farmers.  Moreover, high seed prices raised the farmers’ input costs, while sale prices remained low. In the state of Maharashtra, more than 2,500 farmers committed suicide each year between 2002 and 2009.

Two senior executives at Yara , have been recently charged  in relation to an ongoing corruption probe and has faced several police probes over the past two years in relation to its ventures or operations in Switzerland, Libya and India .

cries for help - little hope

The people in the village of Goubeyday in Niger usually spend the vast majority of their meager incomes on food, so they don’t have enough money to compensate for the drastic increase in food prices at the market.

World Food Programme Niger Country Director Denise Brown said the World Food Programme has not yet been able to provide aid to the people of Goubeyday because of a lack of funding.

According to the United Nations, at least 15 million people in the Sahel region just south of the Sahara desert are affected.  Eight million are at serious risk of running out of food before the next harvest, and a million children’s lives could be threatened by severe malnutrition. Disaster declarations have been declared in seven of the eight affected countries.  Niger is the hardest-hit country, home to about half of the more than 8 million people WFP would like to help. The world’s largest aid agencies– including WFP, Oxfam, UNICEF, Save the Children, and World Vision– have seen this crisis coming for months.  By appealing for help early, they hoped to apply lessons learned from last year’s late response to the famine in the Horn of Africa to keep this crisis from becoming another catastrophe.  But few donors have responded, and most aid groups have raised less than half of the funds needed for their planned response.

Many in West Africa are pastoralists.  Many of them are nomads who roam to find pasture and water for their cattle.  Both are getting harder to find. “This is big, difficult situation.  Pastoralists must now sell many animals just to be able to buy a little cereal to survive,” said Hassane Baka of the AREN cattle breeders association based in the city of Maradi. “We are working too hard, walking too far,” said Amadou Damana as he worked with his family to draw water from a well in the district of Bermo. Damana said his cattle need water every day to stay healthy, but now he is barely able to give them water every other day because he has to walk them so far from the well to find land where they can graze.

At a nearby livestock market, extremely thin bulls and sheep are waiting to be sold. Trader Jodi Makau says the price for grain is so high, an animal sold this year can buy only half as much as last year.  He tells us it is a bad time for breeders to sell, but many are so desperate to buy food and animal feed they have no choice.

"I think we have to keep in mind these women, these mothers, they’re like you, they’re like me. There’s no difference. They have a child. They love that child. They will do what they can to protect that child,” said Brown. “These women, these children, they deserve our attention.”
http://www.karnnewsradio.com/rssItem.asp?feedid=113&itemid=29854126

No Money - No Food

 Just 15 per cent of its land is good enough to produce food or raise animals and now, for the third time in the past decade, drought has returned to Niger.

Aid agencies earlier this year revealed that tens of thousands of people died needlessly last year in the Horn of Africa because aid donors waited until people started dying to respond. Now agencies hoping to prevent a similar famine in the landlocked West African nation of Niger are having trouble getting aid donors to take notice. More than 5 million people in the Sahel region are facing famine and aid agencies want to move early before the dire situation becomes a crisis. Signs of the looming famine in the Sahel were first detected late last year - that is when aid organisations started issuing pleas for help.But selling the prevention message is never easy when there are not corpses to go with it.

 Denise Gibson, the World Food Program's country director in Niger, says the situation is urgent.
"What we've seen in over the past couple of months is a steady deterioration in the food security situation. The poorest people ... their situation is not getting any better, it's getting worse. People are still eating, they are eating wild leaves, they are eating wild berries, we don't want them to be eating that, but they are still eating," Ms Gibson said.

And when they run out of wild leaves and berries?

 Once again it is reported that there here is food in the markets in Niger, but people do not have the money to buy it.

In the predominantly rural economy, where 80 per cent of people rely on subsistence agriculture to survive, a succession of droughts has sapped the funds of most people. Oil has recently been discovered in the Niger and it is set to become the world's second-largest uranium exporter, but for the moment many of its people are struggling to survive.

Haiti - “The Republic of NGOs,”

Africans can learn from the experience of Haiti when it comes to foreign aid promises. Haiti is a formerly French colonial island nation occupying a little less than half of the Caribbean island originally called Hispanola (the other half of the island, the Dominican Republic, is a former Spanish colony). The island soon became a critical stop in the slave trade in the Americas, with its capital, Port-au-Prince, being one of the most popular hubs. The colonial overseers grew rich, exporting sugar and coffee to the world. By 1804, due to several slave uprisings, the poor natives overthrew French rule and became the first free nation in Latin America. Like other new democratic successes of the Atlantic World, the Haitians discovered self-determination. They also discovered debt, saddled with a French demand for 150 million francs (more than $20 billion in today’s terms) to compensate the colonial power for its lost territory.

The world pledged some $12 billion after the 2010 earthquake to Haiti . Two years later, little has been used to actually rebuild the country. According to reports by Oxfam, the UN, the U.S. Government Accountability Office and international aid experts interviewed by GlobalPost, billions of dollars of aid were pledged to Haiti’s reconstruction, but promises of funding have not translated into money on the ground. Of the original $1.4 billion allocated by the US Congress, according to a most recent GAO report, $655 million in funds was reimbursed to the Department of Defense. Another $220 million went to repay the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. $350 million went to disaster assistance (an umbrella term that includes everything from medical care to sanitation); $150 million to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (for emergency food and forward-thinking agricultural programs in Haiti); and $15 million to the Department of Homeland Security for Immigration fees and aircraft fares for the lucky few Haitian refugees brought to the United States.

“In the end,” says Robert Fatton Jr., professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia “...if you read the reports — the UN Report and so on — you’ll see that actual Haitians got less than 1 percent of all the American money pledged.” In other words, Fatton explained, “99 percent of [the U.S. money spent] went back to the U.S. military, the State Department, NGOs and contractors. The money was clearly intended for Haiti, but it ended up returning to the same place it came from.”

Expanding the picture doesn’t change it. The UN Special Envoy for Haiti reported that of the overall $2.4 billion pledged by the UN for humanitarian efforts in Haiti, 34 percent (or $864 million) of those funds were given back to donor civil and military organizations, 28 percent (or $672 million) was laid out to UN and non-governmental humanitarian projects such as housing and health-care, 26 percent (or $624 million) was given to contractors for things like road-building and infrastructure, and 5 percent ($120 million) was given to various international Red Cross/Red Crescent societies.

As recently as the early 1980s, Haiti was producing just about all of its own rice. Now more than 60 percent is imported from the U.S., making it the fourth largest recipient of American rice exports in the world. That was before the quake and now with donated rice coming in as well, Haiti is even more awash in rice while American agribusiness makes billions of dollars every year through generous government subsidies.

“You might say it is a perfect metaphor for what is wrong with aid to Haiti,” says Marc Cohen, a senior researcher for Oxfam. “Instead of bringing subsidized rice in on ships from Miami, we could be helping Haiti grow rice in its own fields,” explains Cohen, who worked for many years in Haiti with the International Food Policy Research Institute and studied the broad economic impact of U.S. rice subsidies, or “Miami rice,” as it is known here.

If you really want to see the face of humanitarian spending post-earthquake in Haiti — the financial clout of the NGOs — there’s only one place to go: the Toyota dealership in Port-au-Prince. The white Toyota Land Cruiser is perhaps the ultimate symbol of international interventional power. And in and around Port-au-Prince, the vehicles are omnipresent.

How much does one cost?“Each one, with taxes, is $61,100,” she says. “If you have tax-free status, you can get them for less, but then you have to take them with you or give them away here. If you pay the taxes, you can just sell the car.”

And how many do you sell a year?

“This year, we sold 250 of this model. But, you know, right after the earthquake, for several months, we were probably selling that many Land Cruisers every month. Maybe twice that many.”

250 Land Cruisers at $61,000 each is upward of $15 million dollars. So even if they sold only a few more Land Cruisers in 2010 after the first few months (and you have to assume they did) plus the 2011 sales numbers so far , conservatively speaking that’s a gross cash influx in the neighborhood of $100 million in the last two years (though of course, some will have to go to taxes). Add to that the repair and maintenance fees, and you’re looking at maybe $110 million. Maybe $150 million. And that’s a conservative estimate.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/11/haiti_where_did_the_aid_go/

Why Hunger?

With one billion people going to bed hungry every day and about the same number obese the geography of hunger presents inherent contradictions. Pictures and videos roll out rapidly from drought-stricken Horn of Africa, breaking our hearts as we see children so malnourished and clinging to helpless mothers. The pictures of dead cattle complete the scenes that scream nothing but hopelessness. At the other end of the spectrum we see obese folks in rich nations struggling to hook on their double belts around their bulges.

Why are we so hungry? Why is it that unless the photos of the dead and the dying appear in the media, some African governments keep mute and do nothing about these tragedies? How come that when they do anything at all it is often just begging for aid? But the hunger in the Horn of Africa did not just happen. Reports say that there has been rain failure over the past three years and the people in those areas have been gradually reduced to a state of helplessness while no one paid attention. Some are said to have been displaced from rich ancestral lands and were forced to live in parched lands where they had no coping mechanisms and support.

Is it beyond government and institutions in the drought-stricken areas to find better ways of water management, including rain harvesting and irrigation, that would help the affected people cope and flourish? How about tested agro-ecological cultivation methods that small-scale farmers have used to great impact in parched parts of Africa, including the Tigray region of Ethiopia? Is it impossible for governments to provide basic infrastructure that would help move food from areas with good rainfall to areas that are deprived? An example is what we hear is the situation in Uganda. The north eastern part of the country is currently faced with drought and crop failures while the western part is lush, green and with bountiful harvests. The situation was the same in Zambia in 2004 when one region had food shortages while things were normal in other areas.

The food business seeks to pile up profits and not to eliminate hunger. In fact the more hungry we are, the more profit they make. It can thus be suggested that food merchants are glad to entrench hunger and keep populations dependent on their products. For many years this has been seen as the principal objective of food aid. For example, donors who insist on in-kind aid see food aid as a way to dump their surplus production on needy countries, by extension expanding the market for those products. Food aid is not free food. Apart from emergency food aid that is largely free, others like programme aid and project aid (including things like school feeding projects) are paid for by the recipient nations. It is interesting to note that as a rule 75 percent of food aid from the US must be bought, processed, transported and distributed by US companies. It is also interesting to note that only four companies control over 80 percent of the transport and delivery of food aid in the world. The transaction costs, including the costly transportation, take over 60 percent of emergency food aid costs. Food aid was a principal foreign policy tool. Till date it remains conditional and is often tied with demands for prescribed economic reforms. Hunger is a great tool for the subjugation of peoples, distortion of local food production and the building of dependency. It is a shame that African governments keep extending the beggar’s bowl rather than taking steps to fight the scourge.

Adapted from here

Africa can feed not just itself but the world. This is the claim made by Kanayo Nwanze, the president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad), a specialised agency of the UN. Nwanze argues that Africa is facing the fallout of decades of neglecting agriculture, a fault that lies with African governments and aid donors. Nwanze drew a sharp contrast between Gansu province, in northwest China, and parts of Africa that cannot feed itself. He said like many parts of the world, Gansu suffers from frequent drought, limited water for irrigation and severe soil erosion. Yet despite the weather and the harsh environment, the farmers in the Gansu programme area are feeding themselves.

"It has a very harsh environment, it has only 300 millimetres of rain annually, compared to parts of the Sahel which gets 400-600 millimetres, but the government has invested in roads and electricity. We found a community willing to transform their lives by harvesting rainwater, using biogas, terracing mountain slopes. There are crops for livestock, they are growing vegetables, wheat and maize, and generating income that allows them to build resilience." He explained. The Ifad president says Africa could easily increase the use of fertilisers without making a dent on the environment, because current usage is so low. And he cites the potential to increase irrigation – only about 7% of land in the whole of Africa is irrigated, compared with more than 30% of land in Asia – and the scope for farmers to use improved seed varieties that would dramatically boost productivity. "The potential is huge," said Nwanze. "With a little investment, Africa can feed itself and it has the potential to feed the world."

no money - no eat

This year at least 20 million people are suffering hunger in east Africa. From 2008-2010, the Red Cross launched four international appeals to respond to hunger in the Horn of Africa. However, a Red Cross review, highlights how such repeated large-scale appeals and relief operations are not the answer to addressing people’s food needs in the region. Hunger is a chronic and ongoing humanitarian issue in the Horn of Africa.

Distributing food aid, that is often purchased from abroad, is not usually the best option. Not only does this destabilise local markets, but is also costly and takes time to purchase and distribute. Repeated large-scale emergency appeals have failed to generate significant funds and in the current global financial situation it’s unlikely this will change any time soon.Repeated distributions of food aid every year do not help families get out of poverty – instead they lock them into dependency.

Socialist Banner reads that Mary Atkinson, British Red Cross economic security adviser, says “Most people living in hunger, even farmers, rely on purchasing most of their food. Food is usually available in the market but they cannot afford it, particularly now that food prices are so high. If they had more reliable sources of income, they often wouldn’t need to rely on food aid.” (our emphasis)
Cash is increasingly used as an alternative to food aid as it is easier and quicker to distribute and allows people to buy what they really need while supporting local markets.

food but no money again

In Malawi there is food but no money to take it to the people. Another year with a surplus harvest of maize, the staple food, is good news for Malawi which has the capacity to provide "all the maize needed for humanitarian response for the year, thanks to this surplus," the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) said in its latest report. Dry spells in the south have left around 700,000 people in need of food assistance. But the bad news is that distributing the food aid has been delayed because funding for operational costs has not yet been made available. Malawi's Department of Disaster Management Affairs does not have a budget for this aspect of its response.

Food amidst starvation

In parts of west Africa people are being forced to eat leaves and collect grain from ant hills, say aid agencies, and are warning that 10 million people face starvation across the region.In Niger more than 7 million people – almost half the population – currently face food insecurity in the country. According to UN agencies, 200,000 children need treatment for malnutrition in Niger alone.

Yet it is not a shortage of food thats causing the hunger but the they cannot afford the food.

"When you walk through the markets, you can see that there is food here. The problem is that the ability to buy it has disappeared. People here depend on livestock to support themselves, but animals are being killed on the edge of exhaustion, and that means they are being sold for far less money. And on top of that, the cost of food basics has risen" explained Caroline Gluck, an Oxfam representative.

"The question now is how many people do we have to see die before the world will act?" she asked.

WHEN AID IS NO FIRST AID

Extracts from this article.

In 1960, South Korea was as poor as the African countries, but thirty years later, the country was wealthy enough to offer aid to Africa.

The African continent has struggled with chronic poverty and under-development since the advent of political independence more than fifty years, and many Africans view this problem as one of Africa's own making. African development experts and academics have blamed foreign aid for the continued and seemingly intractable development crisis confronting the continent. Africa's war on poverty is perceived as amounting to begging and submissiveness, leading to reforms that have made Africans poorer. The contention among many African experts is that the more the developed north co-operated with the south, the poorer Africa became. Foreign aid has generally benefited the ruling elites in Africa, by among other things, enabling and perpetuating corrupt governments' hold on power, and by extension, entrenching the pervasive underdevelopment. Poverty is a justification for aid, but it is seldom the main criterion used for allocating it.

Over the past five decades, foreign emergency assistance to Africa has helped to avert hardship for many of Africa's poor, but failed to promote any significant economic development.Providing assistance to Africa's poor is a noble cause, but the five decades long campaign of aid has turned out to be what one critic called “a theater of the absurd.” To-date, the record of western aid to Africa has been significant, amounting to more than $500 billion between 1960 and 1997, which is the equivalent of four Marshall Plans being pumped into Sub-Saharan African. And today, the national budgets of most Sub-Saharan African countries are dependent on foreign aid for up to eighty percent of the annual budgets. Apart from the relief aid and economic development, foreign aid assistance was also provided to support reforms and policy adjustment programs. And between 1981 and 1991 alone, The World Bank provided $20 billion towards Africa's structural adjustment programs. The purpose of the programs was to make public institutions, government agencies, and bureaucracies in Africa more transparent, effective, efficient and accountable. It is baffling that Africa still suffers from a poverty trap, considering the depth of governments' corruption and the missing billions in export earnings from oil, gas, diamonds and other resources.

The disadvantages of aid include the fact that funding provided is usually tied to the fact it must be spend in the donor countries regardless of the high cost of goods and services. Rather than create wealth, prosperity and economic development, most Africans have over the past few decades realized a net decline in their standards of living. Research shows that over the period that foreign aid was being pumped into Africa, the per capita GDP declined by an averaged of 0.59 percent annually, between 1975 and 2000. The Heritage Foundation in 1985 concluded that foreign aid is not the answer to Africa's economic troubles; and in fact, the organization maintained that aid was contributing to Africa's underdevelopment woes. It is now a popular belief that foreign aid has been found to do more harm, leading to the situation where Africans have failed to set their own pace and direction of development; free of external interference. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development admits that aid to Africa has not been successful and despite many years of policy reform, no Sub-Saharan country has completed its adjustment program or achieved any sustained economic growth. Similarly, a Heritage Foundation study found that foreign aid retards the process of economic growth and the accumulation of wealth. The Foundation argued aid dependency pulls entrepreneurship and intellectual capital into non-productive activities, thereby blunting the entrepreneurial spirits of many Africans.In 1976, Tanzania began the $220 million Mufundi paper mill factory project financed by the World Bank. The project turned out to be a total failure, yet for twenty years, Tanzanians paid the bill for that ill-thought out experiment. In the early 1990's, the UNDP spent $900,000 over a three year period trying unsuccessfully to show farmers in north-east Ivory Coast how to cultivate onions. Meanwhile, 90 miles north, in neighboring Burkina Faso, the farmers there were growing onions profitably under similar agricultural conditions, but without any foreign aid. The decades of financial and technical aid transfers to Africa have not fostered economic growth, rather, it has left seventy countries, primarily in Sub-Saharan African, poorer than they were in 1980, and 43 are worst off than they were in 1970. The United Nations Development Program describes the 1980's, the period of highest foreign aid transfer to Africa, as the “lost decade.” Over much of that decade, 100 countries mostly in Africa, suffered major economic decline or net stagnation, and the conclusion is that foreign aid failed to create economic growth in aid recipient countries. The old belief that aid transfer allowed poor countries to escape the poverty trap has been refuted, because research has proved that poverty, contrary to the popular belief, is not caused by capital shortage. In fact, studies show that there is no correlation between aid and economic development, rather, most aid recipient countries have become and remained more dependent of foreign aid. Additionally, a World Bank study showed that food aid budgets in developed nations were mainly guided by prospects for commercial exports of surplus from donor countries, and not determined in accordance with the needs and objectives of recipient countries' to reduce dependence on imported food. Donors reduce food aid budgets when the prospect for commercial exports are good, and increase them when the prospects are poor. A U.S 1997 General Accounting Office report, criticized USAID for having no strategies for the assessment of the impact of its programs in enhancing the food security, and further, the Agency could not determine whether food aid was an efficient means of accomplishing food security goals in aid recipient African countries. Poor policy choices in Africa have caused development there to first stagnate and decline over the past several decades.The public image of foreign aid is of Western beneficence; nevertheless, studies show in some cases, foreign worker remittance to their countries of origin far exceeds the annual aid transfers from some European countries. In 1998, the officially recorded remittance from the Netherlands to forty-two low-income developing countries exceeded U.S. $1 billion; a sum equivalent to 115 percent of Dutch aid to those countries.

Foreign aid serves a useful purpose when it is provided to alleviate temporary hardship as in cases of natural disasters such as droughts, but, experience in Africa has proved that aid recipients could easily construe foreign aid as a substitution to their own productivity. Across the continent, food aid has suppressed food production, undermining the prices of local produced foods. A World Bank finding on food import into Somalia in 1998 concluded that aid had methodically undermined Somalia's civil society. Somalia had become more dependent on imported food than any other country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report noted that until food aid began to arrive in Somalia, the economy was predominantly an agricultural and pastoral economy. And up until the early seventies, Somalia was self-sufficient in food grains production; however, Somalia's share of food imported in total volume of food consumption rose from less than 33 per cent in 1979 to over 63 per cent in 1984. This sea change ironically coincided with the period of highest food aid distribution to that country. By increasing the supply of food aid, Somalia's domestic food prices were dampened, and the prices of local food crops were prevented from rising, thus reducing the incentives for domestic food crop producers. This exacerbated Somalia's food deficit.

Studies show that there is overwhelming evidence that foreign aid has helped to under-write the misguided policies of the corrupt and bloated government bureaucracies across Africa. The Oxford International Group study revealed that the external stock of capital held by Africans in overseas accounts, was between $700billion and $800 billion in 2005, and nearly 40% of Africa's aggregate wealth was stacked in foreign bank accounts in Europe, United States and Japan. A former U.S Ambassador to Ghana, Edward P. Bryan, admitted that foreign donors have allowed what he describes as “a small, clever class that inherited power from the colonial masters to take us to the cleaners.” It will take a lot of resources and time to turn Africa around. In March 1990, a Paris daily, Le Monde wrote, “Every franc given to impoverished Africans, comes back to France or is smuggled into Switzerland by African bureaucrats and politicians.” And critics contend that donor agencies knew or should have known the motivation and activities of corrupt African leaders who spirit away billions into Swiss Banks and other western bank accounts. Even famine relief aid is not spared. As early as the late 1980's, a former head of Medicine Sans Frontiers, Dr. Rory Branman, lamented the failure of aid to Africa, saying, “We have been duped.” The Western governments and humanitarian groups”, he said, have “unwittingly fueled and are continuing to fuel an operation that will be described in hindsight in a few years' time as one of the greatest slaughters of our time.” The World Bank admitted that in most cases Western donors knew that up to 30 per cent of the loans to African countries and governments went directly into the bank accounts of corrupt officials, yet The Bank considered these officials and their governments as partners in development.A major debilitating by-product of foreign aid to Africa is the culture of corruption that has taken root at every level of every government. Today, corruption has become the way of life in every country in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the theft, bribery and embezzlement of aid, and other government resources are so endemic, they are not considered as crimes. African politicians and government officials have engaged in corruption practices, and a 2004-2005 World Bank Report showed that $148 billion were embezzled out of Africa by politicians and bureaucrats; a significant amount of it being aid and loans earmarked for development activities to benefit Africa's poor. Without transparency, accountability, and good governance, Africa's future will continue to remain bleak.

Because it is tied with geo-politics, trade and banking, foreign aid cannot be classified purely as gift-giving. During its first four decades, victory in the Cold War was the compelling and pre-eminent drive in the regime of aid giving. Today, experts have identified the predominant motives for aid giving as strategic socio-political, mercantile, and humanitarian and ethical. Official aid is seldom the tool of altruism alone, because the direction of foreign aid is dictated by political and strategic considerations, much more than the economic needs and policy performance of the recipient. However, the motives behind aid never come in fixed and stable proportions. Perhaps the one safest generalization to make is that foreign aid, when used alone or in combination with other policy instruments, has a unique ability to allow the donors to demonstrate compassion, while simultaneously pursuing a variety of other ulterior motives and objectives.

Aid to Poverty

The German magazine Der Spiegel has a report upon development aid in Africa and its problems which is well worth quoting extracts from .

"...The main reason that there is starvation in Africa is that there are no profits to be made in cultivating or trading foodstuffs. Either developmental aid ruins the profits or corrupt leaders rob their people blind..."

"..UN's employees are paid to fight hunger, and that's why they usually write reports in which they dramatically portray the situation in Africa and which they usually end with appeals demanding more donated food... And what happens when the help comes? First the merchants complain because the cost of food drops through the floor. Nor is it worth it, under the status quo, to build up any surplus stocks. Then, the farmers complain because their crops become worthless..."

"...Where there is hunger, it results from unethical leaders who steal from their people and let them either starve or rush them into wars...Kenya currently has 94 ministers and assistant ministers, each of whom earns more than $20,000 (€12,940) a month on top of having their own state-funded compound...."

In a previous Der Spiegel interview Kenyan economics expert and capitalist apologist James Shikwati said that aid to Africa does more harm than good.

Shikwati: ...Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.
SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?
Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere...

Shikwati: ... and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN's World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It's a simple but fatal cycle...

SPIEGEL: In the West, there are many compassionate citizens wanting to help Africa. Each year, they donate money and pack their old clothes into collection bags ...
Shikwati: ... and they flood our markets with that stuff...Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They're in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria's textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide..."

As Socialist Banner has always claimed , the craziness of the capitalist market economy creates the contradictions that provides for the existence of poverty alongside plenty .Patching the system up with humanitarian aid fails to deliver the real solution . Only socialism can end African's poverty .

Salving ones conscience

Paleontologists hunting fossils of early man in the Rift Valley of southern Ethiopia call the area the cradle of mankind. This year it's bursting with life, especially in the fields where local farmers grow barley, potatoes and teff, a cereal used to make the flat, spongy bread injera. As a warm July rain falls on a patchwork of smallholdings half a day's walk from the nearest road, the women harvest yams, the men plow behind sturdy oxen and fat chickens, goats and cows roam outside mud huts. And yet for all the apparent abundance, this area is so short of food that many are dying from starvation.
It is reported that in the six weeks to mid-July, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treated 11,800 Ethiopian children for severe acute malnutrition. At a tented hospital in the town of Kuyera, 50 out of 1,000 died, double the rate MSF expects for a full-fledged famine.
"It's very bizarre," says Jean de Cambry, a Belgian MSF veteran of crises from Sudan to Afghanistan. "It's so green. But you have all these people dying of hunger."

Over time, sustained food aid creates dependence on handouts and shifts focus away from improving agricultural practices to increase local food supplies. Ethiopia exemplifies the consequences of giving a starving man a fish instead of teaching him to catch his own. This year the U.S. will give more than $800 million to Ethiopia: $460 million for food, $350 million for HIV/AIDS treatment — and just $7 million for agricultural development. Why bother with development when shortfalls are met by aid?
Ethiopian farmers can't compete with free food, so they stop trying. Over time, there's a loss of key skills, and a country that doesn't have to feed itself soon becomes a country that can't.

The politics of markets

Socialist Banner is not innocent or naive enough to not suspect that the following story is one purposefully planted in the media by American propaganda psy-ops to discredit Sudan .

However, we know that many nations find that the world market for food-stuffs is more profitable than the the home domestic market and that the export of food while people starve is a well-documented phenomena and therefore feel that the essential elements of the story is more than probably true .

Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.

Sudan is growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian Army.
Last year, the United States government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tons of sorghum, and that is about the same amount that Sudan exported. This year, Sudanese companies are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur. Many European countries which can buy relief food locally bought 117,000 tons of Sudanese sorghum last year but United Nations officials said they would like to buy more , however Sudanese suppliers could make more money with exports.

Professor Eric Reeves, an outspoken activist who has written frequently on the Darfur crisis, called this anomaly described Sudanese government’s strategy as one to manipulate “national wealth and power to further enrich itself and its cronies, while the marginalized regions of the country suffer from terrible poverty.”

Sudan has 208 million acres of arable land, with less than a quarter being cultivated.

“Sudan could be self-sufficient,” said Kenro Oshidari, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Sudan. “It does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa.”

Capitalist Markets and Food Shortages

From the BBC we read that six million children in Ethiopia are at risk of acute malnutrition following the failure of rains, the UN children's agency, Unicef, has warned. The WFP estimates it needs to raise $147m (£75m) to tackle Ethiopia's needs. Aid workers say the money just is not arriving, with donors concentrating on the disasters in Burma and China.

Ethiopia for most of the past three decades has survived on millions tonnes of donated food and millions of dollars in cash. It has received more emergency support than any other African nation in that time. Its population is increasing by 2m every year, yet over the past 10 years, its net agricultural production has steadily declined. Even in good years, some 5m people need food aid just to survive.

Why, with so much international support, have things gotten worse and not better?

Foremost is that any large-scale intervention by definition distorts local economics.
"We import huge amounts of grain from abroad. So this will inevitably affect the internal production and markets," said the Deputy Prime Minister Addisu Legesse.
When foreign aid lands, local prices collapse, and farmers who have managed to produce a surplus find their crop is virtually worthless. They have no money to pay for seed or fertiliser for the following year.

Food for thought

As a result of the protests reported here Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo has cancelled custom duties after a second day of violent protests against rising food costs. Mr Gbagbo also cut taxes on basic household products .

But let no-one be under the mis-comprehension that tampering with the effects locally will solve the problem .

The head of the World Food Programme warned rising food prices had helped create a "perfect storm", leaving more people hungry than ever before. "The cost of our food has doubled in just the last nine months," said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran. "We're very concerned about our operations."

Sheeran also confirmed what Socialist Banner keeps repeating - that capitalism is a "can't pay, can't have" system of society regardless of need .

"We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before," she said. "Often we are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

Food Waste in the UK

Britain is throwing away half of all the food produced on farms .

About 20 million tons of food is thrown out each year: equivalent to half of the food import needs for the whole of Africa.

Last week Japan pledged more than 300 million yen in food aid for Burundi, in Africa, where malnutrition runs at 44 per cent. The food thrown away in the UK last year would meet the equivalent of Burundi's shortages more than 40 times over.

The United Nation's World Food Programme has admitted it might have to ration food aid in response to rocketing global food prices that have soared by more than 75 per cent since their lows of 2000, jumping by more than a fifth last year alone, prompting riots in some countries.

Tim Lang, food policy professor at City University, said: "Waste is a fundamental part of the food economy and it will be hard to get rid of. I do not see how simply appealing to morals will do it."

The need for profit takes precedence over the peoples need for food .

Rationing the Rations

The director of the UN's World Food Programme has said it is considering plans to ration food aid because of rising prices and a shortage of funds. The WFP needed increased contributions from donors to make sure it could meet the needs of those who already rely on it.

Food prices rose 40% last year because of rising demand and other factors.
Earlier this month, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said the rising price of cereals such as wheat and maize had become a "major global concern".

The FAO estimated poor countries would see their cereal import bill rise by more than a third this year. Africa as a whole is expected to see a 49% increase.

"If food is twice as expensive, we can bring half as much in for the same price and the same contribution," the director of the UN's World Food Programme said "...In some of these developing countries, prices have gone up 80% for staple food," she added. "When you see those kinds of increases, they are simply priced out of the food markets."

Food shortages forecasted

The rising price of cereals such as wheat and maize is a "major global concern", the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says. Africa as a whole is expected to see an estimated 49% increase this year.

It is estimated poor countries will pay a record $33.1 billion (£17 billion) for cereal imports in the year to July 2008. This is despite a fall in the total amount they will import.

The FAO warned 36 countries around the world were facing a food crisis. 21 of them are in Africa.

Lesotho, Somalia and Swaziland are said to be facing an "exceptional shortfall" in food supply after years of adverse weather. The FAO this week launched an appeal for $87 million of emergency assistance to help flood-affected populations in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.

Proof that the capitalist market system cannot provide for all .

Taxing Food

"Bread used to be called the white or rich person's maize, and maize was the Swazi's or poor person's bread, but now both are beyond reach almost, and it is making more people dependant on food aid," said a food aid distribution officer at the village of Mliba

Crippling drought is responsible for a decline of up to 80 percent in maize harvests in some parts of the Swaziland . Over 400,000 people out of a population of 970,000 now need some form of food aid to survive.

The price of a loaf of bread will jump by 10 US cents, and by the end of the year a loaf may cost US$1 in a country where over 60 percent of people live on less than US$1 a day .

But the radically escalating price of bread is not related to Swazi weather; no wheat is grown in the country. Rather, it is because of the government's desire for tax revenue. Through its price-fixing arm, the National Agricultural Marketing Board , an 8.5 percent levy is fixed on all wheat imported into the country.

"Swaziland, the nation with the worst food crisis per capita in the southern African region, has the most expensive flour in the region. This is because of government tax," said the manager of an industrial bakery. Bakeries say they can no longer absorb the high cost of flour without passing on the increases to consumers. If forced to shut down, they warned that 2,000 jobs could be lost in a country where formal-sector unemployment is above 40 percent. Some bakeries are coping by cheating, and stories about undersized loaves of bread feature extensively in the local media.


Why is the Swazi government charging wheat importers this levy when there are no farmers producing wheat in Swaziland who need to be protected from unfair competition?

A shopkeeper and restaurant owner in the central commercial town of Manzini says "This is all about tax revenue for government. Why are they taxing food during a food crisis? It makes no sense - it's just greed."

Finance minister Majozi Sithole told parliament last week that government receives only 20 percent of the customs duties due to it because of the under-declaring of goods and other cheating at border posts. Since 2004, he has reported annually that the amount of money lost to government through various forms of corruption is equal to the nation's annual debt.