Three Famines

by Keneally, Thomas

  The poor of 2006 had to eat injera made of sorghum or rice instead of teff, and found these alternatives in many cases too harsh on the stomach, sometimes with fatal effects.

  In 2002, Zenawi had acknowledged an Ethiopian crisis, in which 6 million people were in need of assistance, with another 2 to 3 million likely to be stricken in the coming months. Though fortunately averted by emergency aid, this threat had the potential to be worse than Mengistu’s famine.

  In that same year, half a million people were under threat of starvation in Mozambique. And in Malawi, where there had already been a terrible famine in 1949–50, 3.2 million people were threatened by famine. In the earlier Malawi crisis of 1949, men had taken to the roads, obsessed with getting food. ‘People could not stay in one place,’ said a witness. ‘If they heard there was food somewhere they went to find it, no matter how far.’ They travelled to the large towns of Ntcheu, Neno and Mwanza to work in the gardens of people who had plenty of food. Men who had come from elsewhere to marry in a particular region sometimes abandoned their wives and went back to their parents’ home, supposedly to look for food – however, many, wanting to be free from encumbrances in this crisis, never came back again.

  All the other debasements of that 1949–50 famine that occurred in Malawi arose again in Biafra in the newly independent Nigeria. In 1960, the country was a loose confederacy of ethnic groups: the Hausa and Fulani in the north, the Yoruba in the south-west and the Ibo in the south-east. The Ibo and the Hausas were enemies, and up to 30,000 Ibos were killed in conflict between the two groups. About 1 million panicked refugees from other parts of the country fled to their Ibo homeland in the east, where Colonel Emeka Ojukwu declared the independent republic of Biafra in May 1967. Two and a half years later, one million civilians had died in fighting with the Hausa and from famine. The Biafran famine was a media event as well as a tragedy – the first great famine to be covered by the new medium of television.

  In Zimbabwe, as I write, there is a growing famine crisis. Because of the leader Robert Mugabe’s new land policies, farms have fallen into disuse and the price of food, where it can be found in the markets and on the largely empty shelves of grocery stores, is rising every week, not simply by percentages but by multiples. In mismanaged Angola and Mauritania, in a relentless drought, an uncounted number of endangered people await help. In the landlocked state of Zambia, some hundreds of thousands are at risk, but the president has refused to accept genetically modified food, off-loaded from the West, to feed them. Agribusiness from the West is seen both as a plunderer of African seed varieties for use for its own commercial purposes, and as forcing genetically modified food strains upon native populations. This food, for which demand in the West is uncertain, is increasingly sent as food aid to Africa.

  Darfur is a western province of the Sudan, situated in a pitiless desert that stretches away to and beyond the borders of Chad. Malnutrition levels, particularly among children, are very high there, but relief agencies find it hard to work under threats from the central government that they will be thrown out at any time. The flow of food from Khartoum, the capital, is so intruded upon by bureaucrats that one German agency shipped its food in via West Africa and the republic of Chad.

  The Janjaweed Arab militias, armed by the central government, keep African farmers from cultivating their land and destroy before harvest whatever crops are planted. Reports of a collapse in cultivation of crops, due to people being driven off their land by the Janjaweed and Sudanese government soldiers, are universal throughout the province. Increasing numbers of Darfur people have fled to refugee camps, and in 2008 more than 3 million were dependent on food assistance.

  The Global Acute Malnutrition index showed a rate of 21.3 per cent for malnutrition among children in 2007, but Khartoum blocked further testing and the Wali or administrator of north Darfur took on himself the right to censor any malnutrition studies before their release. In 2006, for lack of funding, the World Food program announced that it would cut the rations to Darfur from 1300 calories a day to 1050. This is half the minimum daily calories necessary to maintain health. The program said the problem was it had received just a third of the money it had requested from donor countries.

  The Darfur rebels, for whose existence the government is persecuting an entire population, call themselves the Justice and Equality Movement – JEM. JEM was founded by former supporters, now disenchanted, of the Islamic leader of Sudan, Hassan al-Turabi, who is also leader of the opposition. In its pursuit of JEM the army is relentless. On BBC television, a Sudanese army deserter told of a standard military operation in Darfur, aimed not only on the plunder or destruction of crops, but involving orders from officers to kill adult women and rape and kill thirteen-and fourteen-year-old girls – all of them were, in the army’s eyes, culpable of supporting rebel groups.

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Darfur was an example of the way armies, militias, race and government policy combined to create what the experts call ‘a humanitarian disaster’.

  African famines, especially, have become more complex and difficult to deal with since now they often involve people suffering from AIDS. As well as that, the seasons are becoming more erratic as the climate warms. Arguments about relief and its efficacy continue. And in a modern world where the keeping of statistics is an obsession, the attempted secrecy of regimes, their power to permit relief to penetrate their country only to a certain degree, the existence of rebel groups and the appalling state of infrastructure guarantee that many die beyond view. It still remains impossible, therefore, to number the famine dead. Above all, there is no end to politicians who pursue, at the cost of all compassion and paying the price of human flesh, their denials, dogmas and ideologies.

  Despite seasons of neediness continuing, famine did not return to Ireland after the 1840s, whereas it seems set for tragic repetitions in Ethiopia, and is not done with yet. Ideology might have played a large part in the Irish and Bengal famines. But, according to the distinguished economic historian Cormac Ó’Gráda, in Ethiopia and in many food crises of the present and recent past, it is oppression, war and ‘civic mayhem’ that have been the main reasons for famine mortality. ‘Agency,’ he says, ‘is more important than a food production shortfall. Mars counts for more than Malthus.’

  Surely, then, famine has not had its last ride.

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  ARTICLES

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  Index of Searchable Terms

  Abate, Colonel Atnafu

  Acheson, Dean

  Addis Ababa

  Adedeji, Adebayo

  Adowa

  Aeolus

  Afar, the

  Afar Liberation Front

  Afeworki, Issayas

  African famines

  agribusiness, Western

  aid see relief

  al-Mahdi, Sadiq

  al-Turabi, Hassan

  All-Ethiopia Peasants’ Association

  All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement

  All-Ethiopia Urban Dwellers’

  Association

  Allenby, Sir Edmund

  aman

  Amba

  resettlement site

  amenorrhoea

  American Red Cross

  American Relief Administration (ARA)

  Amery, Leopold

  Amrita Bazar Patrika

  an Gorta Mór

  Board of Guardians

  Board of Temporary Relief

  cannibalism

  Catholic appeal for aid

  corn/maize importation

  deaths

  dysentery

  emigration

  evictions

  exports of foodstuffs

  family separation

  family survival

  fishing and

  food riots
/>   food substitutes

  foreign aid

  grain export during

  Gregory-ism

  informers

  min dèirce

  newspaper coverage

  Poor Law system

  population decline

  potato blight

  prostitution

  Protestantism, conversion to

  public works scheme

  relief

  Relief Commission

  reports of

  resistance

  ‘rural outrages’

  soup kitchens

  ‘souperism’

  theft

  transportation

  trigger

  whistleblowers

  workhouses

  Andom, Aman

  Angola

  anorexia nervosa

  Anuak, the

  Aseb

  Asfaw, Legesse

  Asmara

  Asosa resettlement camp

  Assam

  Auchinleck, General Claude

  aus

  Australia

  Bajpai, Sir Girja

  Bale

  Ballinakill

  Ballinglass

  Ballykilcline

  Band Aid

  Bangladesh

  Banti, Teferi

  Barakpur

  Barre, Mohamed Siad

  Barry, Marion

  Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch

  BBC

  Belafonte, Harry

  Belfast

  Bengal

  annual rainfall

  bargadars