Since 1995, the number of people living in areas that the World Food Program has designated as desperately in need of food aid has soared from only 4 million people five years ago to a near-record 60 million people today. What’s been happening?
The World Food Program blames the increase in near-famine conditions on a series of natural disasters, primarily floods and earthquakes. WFP director Catherine Bertine told the Boston GLobe, “There are so many countries affected. It’s as if Mother Nature took a paint brush and painted a whole huge swath of the world with drought.”
To be sure, there has been a good deal of drought affection Africa and Asia. Part of the blame goes to the erratic weather patterns that are a result of the El Nino/La Nina event, and of course part of the answer is that since recorded time there have always been natural disasters.
But natural disasters do not have to lead to famine. Jean Francois Vidal of Action Against Hunger puts the causation of hunger quite succinctly. “Where there is drought there is not necessarily famine,” Vidal told the Globe, “But where there is drought and civil war, there is disaster.”
It is telling that when you run down the list of countries facing food emergencies they are almost always not only developing countries, but those developing nations who have the biggest problems with ongoing civil wars and corrupt, non-democratic governments. Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Bangladesh, Mozambique, Kenya, Afghanistan, Sudan — to paraphrase Bertine it looks like Mother Nature took a paint brush and condemned illiberal states with near-famine conditions.
But that gets the causation reversed. It is precisely because have an excess of political violence and a short of political freedom that they are unable to cope with natural disasters (many of these countries would have trouble producing enough food without droughts and earthquakes).
Sue Lautze, a specialty on disaster relief, worries about the long term prospects for these parts of Africa and Asia that seem to be constantly on the verge of famine. “I am very worried about the long-term future of these societies,” Lautze said. “The world community is getting very tired of responding” to aid requests. Since external aid is the only thing that has prevented massive starvation in many of these countries, that would be a very worrisome development.
UN reports drought causing vast hunger. Elizabeth Neuffer, The Boston Globe, February 26, 2001.