(Times, UK) Do starving Africans a favour. Don’t feed them

Do starving Africans a favour. Don’t feed them There is famine in Kenya and
Ethiopia again. Sending food and emergency relief will make things
worse in the long term Sam Kiley


The Horn of Africa is in the grip of the worst drought for 47 years! Some 23
million people are threatened with starvation! When you see children on TV
with distended bellies keening over their dying parents, it would be inhuman
not to be moved to tears. But do them a favour. Sit on your hands.

The situation is ghastly to be sure. But, as Christmas approaches, the most
intelligent response to this latest disaster is to quote Ebenezer Scrooge
and cry “bah, humbug”.

African aid organisations have been in the grip of an hysterical number
inflation game since the hideous images of the Ethiopian famine were brought
to our screens 25 years ago today by the BBC’s Michael Buerk. For every year
that has passed the scale of Africa’s problems seem to have grown.

Aid organisations and the media have inflated the scale of subsequent
horror, regardless of the truth. This year the International Rescue
Committee released data from its Democratic Republic of the Congo mortality
survey. “Congo’s war and aftermath have killed 5.4 million,” The Washington
Post yelled, quoting the IRC. Humbug.

The IRC isn’t deliberately lying, neither was the Post. But the idea that
5.4 million people have died as a result of war in Congo is nonsense. It
needs to be peddled to help to generate funds to relieve the real and
hideous suffering of Congo’s population, but nonsense it remains. As the IRC
admits: “Less than 10 per cent of all deaths were due to violence, with most
attributed to easily preventable and treatable conditions such as malaria,
diarrhoea, pneumonia and malnutrition.”

The IRC is saying, really, that the Congolese are dying because they are
poor. Recent work by André Lambert and Louis Lohlé-Tart shows that the
rising mortality rate predates the wars there. But combine “war’’ with
“millions dead’’ and you have a donation-winning headline We all do it. We
use statistics to highlight the horrors in Africa to drive home the
unbelievable scale of the continent’s problems. But that’s the problem: the
scale has become unbelievable. Twenty-three million? From my experience of
two decades’ reporting from Africa, I can say with absolute confidence that
this is humbug. Did anyone count them? No.

Oxfam says that 3.8 million Kenyans, more than 3.8 million Somalis, and 13.7
million Ethiopians “need aid”. Implicit in this is that they could perish
through lack of food. In Kenya it might be possible to make this guess. But
in Somalia, which has been in a post-apocalyptic state of anarchy since
1991?

There is a drought. Just as there is every ten years. This is the worst in a
generation. But even if 23 million people do face starvation, please don’t
reach for your cheque book. Foreign aid is the principal reason for Africa’s
accumulated agony.

According to Oxfam: “Food aid saves lives, but it crowds out other ...
initiatives that support communities’ strategies to prevent the next drought
from becoming a disaster.” Exactly. If we send help now, we’ll be killing
more people later because more people will be bred and no one will think to
save any crops to feed them.

Kenya is having a terrible time. But it would not be doing so if the
breadbasket in the west of the country had not been torn apart by ethnic
violence. If the agricultural outreach programmes, which helped farmers to
improve productivity through the 1960s and 1970s, had not collapsed, if the
Government’s milk and beef marketing system was not ruined by corruption,
and if people had not been settled on marginal land that can never sustain
them, then Kenya would be able to feed itself even in times of drought.
When the rains do come to Kenya there are not enough seed stocks. Kenya’s
politicians have stolen much of the aid that we have sent them, and now we
are expected to feed their constituents. Every time Kenya, or for that
matter Ethiopia, has faced a food shortage the wealthy nations have come to
the rescue.

Oxfam reveals in its latest paper, Band Aids and Beyond, that between 70 and
92 per cent of US aid to Ethiopia has been food aid — and almost all of that
was the surplus product of American farms. So Ethiopia has had no need to
feed itself. Worse still, Ethiopia and Eritrea spent billions that should
have been used to develop self-sufficiency between 1998 and 2000 on a border
war over a mess of barren rocks. They could do this because we in the
wealthy North fed the populations of both countries.
So, what to do? For an answer I turn to Birham Woldu, who survived the
(man-made) 1984 famine in Ethiopia.

“Constantly shipping food from places like the US is costly, uneconomic, and
can encourage dependency,” she writes in the Oxfam report. “We are a big
country and when there is famine in one part of the country, there is plenty
in another. So we need better infrastructure and communications to move food
around to where it is needed. Above all we need education.”

If they want to badly enough, the Ethiopians can sort out their own roads.
So that leaves education. We can help Africans to help themselves by
donating to charities that ring-fence funding for education. If they don’t
do it, don’t give. Mark all cheques “not for food” if you have to.

With education Africans can and will rid themselves of the incompetent and
corrupt leaders that we have kept in power through foreign aid for decades.
Educated Africans will bring an end to a dangerous cycle of humbug.
Sam Kiley is a former Africa bureau chief of The Times