War and the forgotten continent
Peoples in the Middle East are not the only ones facing a mounting humanitarian crisis owing to the war in Iraq, write Rita Abrahamsen and Ray Bush
As US and UK military forces invade Iraq the death of innocents in the Middle East will be added to those dying from AIDS, famine and preventable illness in Africa. The waging of war at any time, when not sanctioned by international law and when the victims pose no threat to neighbours or invaders, is monstrous. It is even more so as US and UK resources are diverted towards the aims of death and destruction when millions in Africa are starving to death. In Iraq itself, the British Overseas Aid Group (Oxfam, Cafod, Christian Aid, Action Aid and Save the Children) warns of the humanitarian consequences of war in a country where more than 16 million are entirely dependent upon food aid. There has been little concern for the lives of those to be affected by military conflict as preparation to relieve the humanitarian disaster has taken second place to the creation of that disaster. The US will spend $12.5 billion a month on the war although it has offered $65 million to provide help with immediate humanitarian assistance. And when it is time for the reconstruction of Iraq, the US will offer only $50 million of a possible $1.5 billion to NGOs and the UN for the process -- the rest goes to US companies, including those close to White House officials (The Guardian, 18 March 2003).
Meanwhile in Africa 40 million need famine and food relief. More than 14 million of these are in Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, another 15 million in southern Africa, while food relief is also urgently needed in parts of West and Central Africa. The crisis is the result of a complex set of factors, including a combination of drought, economic marginalisation and international and national food policies, which continue to harm Africa's peasants and their ability to thrive. In this situation, the military aggression against Iraq and the missionary zeal of the Bush/Blair axis to promote their military solutions to regional conflicts pose enormous concerns for Africa. While Saddam Hussein's policies have long been indefensible and his regime bestial, the launch of a military campaign to oust him rather than a tight inspection programme to ensure the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, breaches international law and promotes US imperialist aggression. The UN charter has been flagrantly abused in the riding roughshod over international anti-war opinion. The West can always summon, it seems, money and materiel to defend the ascendant US oil and military conglomerates encapsulated in the Bush/ Cheney White House, but it will not create conditions to stop mass death through starvation. In March this year the UN accused the international community of being so distracted by the desire to silence Saddam that not a penny had been received in response to an urgent appeal for funds to respond to famine threatening one million in the Central African Republic. Torn by a war that has displaced more than 150,000 people, the UN World Food Programme launched an appeal in January 2003 for $6.1 million but by mid-March, just before General Francois Bozize seized power and suspended parliament, had not received anything.
A similar picture emerges from elsewhere. As 3.3 million Eritreans are confronted by famine, the UN has asked the industrialised world for $163 million only to receive $4 million. Burundi has received three per cent of the amount requested by the UN; Liberia 1.2 per cent; Sierra Leone one per cent; Guinea 0.4 per cent and Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo each less than six per cent of funds requested by the UN to avert humanitarian disaster (The Guardian, 18 March 2003). In short, meteorological drought seems to be accompanied by the drying up of donor funds for famine relief.
African leaders have been wavering in their opposition to the war. Nelson Mandela certainly lent his considerable moral authority against conflict, and President Thabo Mbeki recently noted that war is "not in the best interests of the peoples of Africa". Not the least this is because higher oil prices will undermine any possible economic recovery for non-oil producers and erase any progress in debt relief -- it would certainly undo any of the benefits from the 2002 deal with the industrial North to increase aid to Africa. So much for the improvement in economic relations between the leading industrial powers and Africa promised by the rhetoric of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), a blueprint for survival adopted by the African Union last year. A presidential spokesman for Mbeki noted in January 2003 that war "would put paid to all the high hopes raised by ... NEPAD ... and therefore ensure that the people of Africa would continue to confront the reality of even further impoverishment". Higher oil prices and falling aid budgets push African development off the agenda. If Guinea, Angola and Cameroon did resist US bribery to sway them to support military action in the Security Council, it is to their credit. If it was simply that the US did not offer enough, fast enough and in cash rather than US commodities, then it will be to their shame. Elsewhere there certainly seems to have been a decay of principle. Djibouti it seems has not only its French garrison, but has also been hosting US troops. Another regional actor keen to replace Turkey as a safe haven from which to launch US attacks on the Middle East has been Eritrea. No longer, if ever, a bulwark against the onslaught of US adventure in the Horn, it has been visited by the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and four times since 11 September 2001 by US Military Commander General Tommy Franks. Eritrea has also sent its own military commanders to Washington and employed Washington Lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig LLP (at an estimated $50,000 a month) to stress the importance of Eritrea's geo-strategic position for US aggression. In the words of the lobbyists, "Eritrea provides the United States with a strategic advantage and hospitable atmosphere that cannot be matched in the region" (Washington Post, 14 December 2002).
On the surface, one counter to the gloom arising from declining Western concern for Africa and the continents famine, and right on cue with his moral concern of Africa's suffering, has been Gordon Brown. In February 2003 the UK chancellor of the exchequer lamented the struggle for survival of Africa's 14 million (sic) facing famine. He noted limited progress on reaching the millennium poverty reduction goals and with Clare Short, the UK secretary of state for international development, launched yet another new initiative to raise cash to resolve injustice in Africa. It is very simple. In return for African countries promoting anti- corruption measures and stable conditions for equitable and sustainable economic growth, the developed world will raise aid from $50 billion to $100 billion a year -- this latter figure, it seems, is the sum necessary to meet the millennium development goals. Halving poverty means doubling aid. The money is to be disbursed through existing bilateral and multilateral mechanisms and the commitment from rich countries is intended not to add to poor countries debt burden. Most assistance, although the figure was unspecified, will be in the form of grants. The intention is that the West's insistence on "tough conditionality" will prevent the repeat of previous excesses, namely cash lining the pockets of corrupt elites rather than feeding the hungry (even when the corrupt elites are the allies of the West). Aid should not, moreover, be seen as recompense for past injuries but "investment in a shared future". There is mutuality then in the proposed new initiative.
The poorest and most populous continent represent the world's next engine of economic growth -- future consumers and producers with enormous potential purchasing power essential to the long term growth of industry and trade (The Guardian, 13 February 2003).
Brown concluded, "Every bit as much as the poorest, we stand to gain in a world more united, more just and more prosperous -- a world that grows together, rather than apart."
Brown's position might be well-meaning, but like so much of New Labour's policy towards Africa it is shot through with contradictions. First, while Brown pleads for greater international assistance to combating poverty in Africa, he simultaneously, and with apparent ease, finds money to defend the Bush/Blair war agenda. The chancellor has set aside three billion sterling for the military action in Iraq (www.news.bbc.co.uk, 27 March 2003). By comparison, the annual bilateral aid programme for Africa was 528 million sterling in 2001/02 is set to reach one billion sterling by 2005/06. After six years in government, New Labour's development budget still only accounts for 0.33 per cent of gross national product (GNP) and will reach 0.4 per cent by 2005-06 -- a long way from the UN target of 0.7 per cent of national income (all figures from www.dfid.gov.uk and www.fco.gov.uk). Not only do the resources devoted to the war on Iraq outstrip those devoted to Africa's development, but as discussed above, their allocation will also harm the prospects for growth on the African continent.
Second, Brown's recent call for more aid to Africa remains steeped in the economic liberalism that has caused so much suffering on the continent in recent decades. Thus far, globalisation has not worked for the poor, and however many times the New Labour government repeats this mantra, it is unlikely to do so. On past experience, the united world to which Brown refers means closer integration and cooperation within the industrial north, whereas the manner of Africa's integration into the world economy serves primarily to ensure the further extraction of profit by Northern countries, not the creation of conditions for economic growth in the continent. Moreover, while Africa is told by its donors to liberalise and dismantle trade barriers in the name of globalisation and free trade, the rich countries continue to protect their domestic markets. When the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi visited Tony Blair in London in February 2003 he criticised trade policies and conflict in Iraq as deflecting the world's attention away from tragedy in sub-Saharan Africa. Zenawi noted that while the developed countries criticise the presence of trade barriers in developing countries they do little to reform their own highly protected agricultural sectors. He perhaps understated his feelings when he noted, "There is quite a bit of hypocrisy by the West" (The Guardian, 25 February 2003). The US spends more subsidising its 25,000 cotton farmers than it does on its entire aid budget for Africa. Food subsidies in the G8 countries total $300 billion a year, and according to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, such trade protection in the West is partly responsible for the current food crisis in Africa, as it makes it impossible for African commodities to compete in such highly protected markets (www.news.bbc.co.uk, 6 March 2003). Oxfam estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will lose $2 billion a year due to tariff barriers in the industrialised countries (Oxfam, 2003). Brown's suggestion and plea for more aid does nothing to change these structures of the world economy, and until there are changes in the rules of the game, principally on issues of trade, foreign investment and tariffs, but also on intellectual property rights, migration and asylum law in Europe, Africans will remain losers in the so-called integrated and globalised world economy. Increasing aid, targeting the poor, praising strides in educational achievement and so on, serves to relieve the guilt of donors and partially to improve the purchasing power of African elites. It is not enough to eradicate African poverty or famine.
Famine in Africa is persistent and it seems endemic under existing political and economic relationships within Africa and in the continent's dealings with the West. This is not because the failure of rain necessarily creates mass death through starvation, but because the poor, who are the first to suffer the acutest form of starvation, seem largely powerless to transform their livelihoods to reduce risk of recurrent food and health crises. More than 30 million aids sufferers, most of whom do not have basic medical care, are unable to work. Village profiles of the healthy are inversely related to age: the old and the infirm care for the very young, many of whom are infected with HIV, while those who should be at the peak of fitness are largely motionless, unable to help with any part of the agricultural cycle. Faced with what seems are overwhelming odds of starvation and illness, development agencies in Africa and Africans themselves deal only with crisis management rather than development -- however loosely that term might be defined. Is raising development assistance an answer to these crises? And has not the presence of assistance in Africa historically contributed to the conditions of the contemporary crisis? In the case of the current food crisis, the economic policies championed as the solution to Africa's problems are certainly complicit. In the name of structural adjustment, state marketing agencies have been dismantled, subsidies for fertilisers and other implements abolished, exchange-rate liberalised, leaving the poor peasant even more vulnerable to famine. Crippling debt repayments undermine the ability of governments to respond to the crisis. Aid it seems, is not simply the solution, but also part of the problem.
Rita Abrahamsen teaches at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Ray Bush at the University of Leeds UK. This article is an abridged version of their commentary in Review of African Political Economy, No 96 2003 forthcoming.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 24 - 30 April 2003 (Issue No. 635)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/635/op121.htm