THE POLITICS OF FAMINE

Famine - it’s all down to God, right? Not quite. In fact, many of the great famines could have been alleviated, if not avoided, had the political will been there.
As Zimbabwe prepares to take the chair of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, Roz Paterson reports on Robert Mugabe’s deliberate drive to starve his opponents into submission, and why climate change is at the root of Africa’s droughts, while Ken Ferguson looks back at the fraud that was the Irish Potato Famine, when one-and-a-half million men, women and children starved to death in the midst of abundance.
The ongoing famine in Zimbabwe could see 6.7million people starve to death, yet international aid is drying up as fast as the water supply.
Why? Because this is a politically motivated famine and, rightly or wrongly, donor countries are increasingly refusing to assist Robert Mugabe’s use of food aid as a weapon with which to beat his own people.
Reports from this beleaguered nation, from which the international media is all but banished, reveal that food aid is being distributed by young, armed members of Mugabe’s ruling party, Zanu-PF, and refused to those suspected of supporting the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
One human rights worker describes the chaos:
“In Nkayi, in Matabeleland North, I interviewed one witness who had been planning to stand for the MDC in the district elections in September but was intimidated into pulling out.
“He was threatened into leaving his home. He told me that 20 families in his community had been denied the right to buy food from the government’s Grain Marketing Board warehouses because of their support for the opposition.
“They have also been denied the right to work. So they cannot eat and they cannot earn money.”
The situation is already dire, with incidences of malnutrition and pellagra, a starvation-associated condition, in the ascendance, and El Nino predicted to bring heavy rains followed by prolonged drought this year.
A Unicef survey from 2006 found that malnutrition in the under-5s stood at 6.4 per cent, with acute malnutrition affecting as many as 18.2 per cent in some areas.
Hundreds of thousands more are on the brink, with no harvest in store, worse weather to come, no-one to help and a government intent only on exploiting the situation.
On top of which, foodstuffs are increasingly expensive to buy, due to horrendous inflation - over 100 per cent per annum - and an increasingly worthless currency.
The black market in food, peddled by Zanu-PF officials, is merely extortion by another name.
There’s another factor here too - that of ‘fast-track’ land reform, which has seen cereal production plummet by 57 per cent, and maize by 67 per cent.
Some ‘Rhodesians’ would have you believe that the problem lies with black farmers who, once allotted some land, didn’t know what to do without the guidance of their white masters.
This attitude is as false as it is offensive.
Mugabe’s land reforms may sound, at a very superficial level, like good reforms, but in practise they perpetuate the injustices that have been meted out to poor, black Zimbabweans since the first European colonists set foot here back in 1893.
Led by mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, these armed bandits forced the original black farmers off their land and carved up the spoils between themselves.
The British government then granted them a Royal Charter, allowing them to settle the region - despite the fact that it was already settled, and by its rightful owners.
A massive injection of foreign capital and modern farming techniques followed, turning a once healthy, self-reliant agricultural economy into a mass exporter of food, a warehouse for the Empire.
Independence came in 1965, but violence ensued until, in 1980, white minority rule gave way to democracy and Mugabe was elected.
Land reform was one of his key policies and through it, white farmers were to be compelled to transfer their land back to the original black owners.
But so far, only 71,000 families have been resettled, out of a target of 162,000, on 3.5million hectares of land, less than 20 per cent of which is particularly suitable for cultivation.
Thus, the vast majority of rural black people continue to suffer immense poverty, trying to eke out an existence on an impoverished soil with little or no support from government, if not downright obstruction: of which, more later.
Part of the problem was that land reform began so painfully slowly, prompting grassroots land occupations by landless peasants.
In some cases, they were brutally evicted - by government troops.
White farmers, by contrast, were left pretty much undisturbed.
By 1999, 11million hectares of the most prime land was still owned by 4,500 rich farmers, most of them white. No wonder so many became avid supporters of Zanu-PF.
The British government only made matters worse.
Financial assistance was granted, but it came with strings.
The Tories insisted that land could only be transferred if it was willingly sold, and at the market price, resulting in only very scattered pockets of very poor land being acquired for resettlement.
New Labour’s supposedly ethical foreign policy was little better.
Clare Short, then Minister for International Development, put all the platitudes about poverty alleviation in harsh context when she said:
“We do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe.”
The government’s response was an angry one. To them, and rightly so, the money was a matter of historical obligation rather than development assistance.
Rural poverty was exacerbated by Zimbabwe’s economic crisis of the 1980s, when World Bank debts squeezed the government’s public spending budget, forcing swingeing cuts in health and education spending, and on food subsidies.
The Economic Structural Adjustment Programme, adopted in 1991, sent inflation and interest rates soaring, and saw manufacturing contract, throwing hundreds of thousands of workers onto the mercies of the land; a problem that was compounded by the droughts of 1992 and 1995.
By 1997, Zimbabwe was facing economic and political meltdown as massive social unrest led to strikes and uprisings.
In this white heat was formed the MDC, an alliance of opposition forces and the first national opposition to Zanu-PF in its lifetime.
Mugabe felt threatened, and so he stepped up the land reforms, and the violent repression of his political opponents.
The repression was unspeakable, as homes were bulldozed, people were raped and murdered, others were frozen out of their communities.
And the land reforms, which often amounted to the forced resettlement of farmers, were hardly a success story.
Resettlements were, in fact, very unsettled, with a high degree of turnover as poor farmers found themselves unable to access credit because they were never issued title deeds with which to secure loans. Thus they couldn’t buy seed or equipment.
You need, as they say, more than just land.
Said one retired school teacher to a member of Human Rights Watch:
“In this country, it’s very hard to get employment, but if they just get dumped on a piece of land, that’s worse.”
People often don’t want to be resettled, because it means leaving their home communities, where their children go to school, and where they may well have a stake in communal tribal land, to go to a place where there is no guarantee of security of tenure, and every possibility of destitution.
There is no support for these farmers, no infrastructure such as irrigation or machinery.
Even worse, many are actually obstructed from farming by government-sponsored squatters who steal cattle and prevent cultivation, all in the cause of keeping the rural population desperately dependent on the government’s goodwill.
Of course, there are successful farmers in Zimbabwe too.
These are the rich elite and government friends, who farm vast tracts of the most fertile land and reap the financial rewards.
The tribes who were robbed blind by the Europeans back in 1893, however, have not benefited.
Instead, they have been further disenfranchised by Mugabe’s government, now intent on starving them into submission, and an international community that refuses to accept any culpability, or even look at Zimbabwe’s famine and truly see it for what it is.
This isn’t an act of God, or a bad run of weather, but a deliberately induced famine by an increasingly ruthless regime - turning away and saying we want nothing to do with it is not an option.

Global warming and global inequality - recipe for disaster in Africa

Why is Africa so plagued by famine?
For years now, the Western world’s explanation has run thus - such events didn’t happen during colonial times, therefore it must be that Africans are too stupid to manage their own land. They overgraze, they chop down too many trees, they fail to control their population, and so transform what were once sparse but life-supporting regions into sterile dustbowls.
But none of the above is true.
Tribal Africans have husbanded their lands for thousands of years, learning how to read it, where to graze, where to source water, and where to sow seeds.
Devastation has hit them, for instance across the Sahel region, stretching from the Atlantic to Sudan, not through their own doing, but through ours.
The industrialised world’s failure to rein in its CO2 emissions, sparking a global revolution in our climate, has visited devastation upon whole swathes of the African continent, rendering it unfit for human habitation. Perhaps forever.
What’s happening in Sahel is not a drought - because droughts are temporary aberrations - but a permanent change in climate.
It began in the 1960s, when a marked decline in rainfall was observed, which turned many marginal regions into deserts.
The nomadic peoples whose herds had grazed wherever there was vegetation, found less and less for their animals to eat.
The farmers, used to a harsh terrain from which they had learnt to coax life, watched the fields turn to dust.
During a prolonged drought in the 1970s, some 300,000 people died.
Was this their own fault? Did loss of vegetation through over-grazing, intensive cultivation and reckless deforestation precipitate this crisis through reducing the region’s moisture levels?
A far-reaching and meticulous studied published in November 2003 concluded most definitely not.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, found that human activity in the region had almost no input to the changes wreaked across Sahel.
The problem was the rising sea-surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, the fastest warming ocean on Earth, caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosph ere.
The research, using computer models to simulate climate trends (the most accurate means of doing so), found that, as sea-surface temperatures increased, the forces behind the Sahelian monsoon weakened.
The subsequent ‘drought’ has had a huge impact on Darfur, where famine has helped fuel a genocide.
Darfur is actually a prime example of how the effects of climate change are masked by the political upheavals they exacerbate which, in a hideous positive feedback loop, exacerbate the effects of climate change, through rendering populations less able to cope.
You see this too in relation to the spread of HIV/AIDS, and the callous privatisations of infrastructure, forced on struggling, starving countries by Western lenders, which again leave people less able to meet the demands of a shifting climate. All of which is very convenient for first world governments, who find it much easier to show pity and murmur meaningless platitudes about aid - as they did at the G8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005 - than admit culpability, and agree to cover costs.
Crop failure is damaging to any country, but to Africa it is disastrous.
Some 40 per cent of Gross National Product in many nations is agriculture, while 70 per cent of the workforce works on the land, mostly on a subsistence basis. A shift in climate is felt profoundly, pitching millions into destitution, forcing them into cities, or more often the shanty-towns that sprawl like headlice for miles around conurbations, or across borders, often to countries where they are far from welcome.
Thus one change creates a ripple-like effect, unsettling populations, driving poverty, stoking conflict.
Likewise, as marginal farmers are pushed further into savanna in search of vegetation and water, so they disrupt the important migration routes of creatures such as zebras, wildebeest and elephants.
And, as increased air temperatures dictate a decline in fish stocks in the deep Rift Valley lakes, so fishermen are forced onto the land, intensifying the pressure there, reducing vegetation and making increased demands on a dwindling water supply.
Africans produce, on average, one tonne of CO2 per person per year. In a really poor country like Mali, that drops to one tenth of one tonne. In the US, that rises to 16 tonnes. There, in a nutshell, you have global inequality.
Radically reducing CO2 emissions won’t stop climate change in its tracks, but it will slow it down and, in time, stabilise it again. That’s the best we can hope for, and it’s pretty good all things considered, in that we will be able to live, hopefully in a stable and sustainable world.
Meantime, we must learn to adapt to the climate changes that are already mapped out in the clouds - and our priority must be those at the very sharp end of our violently-changing world.

Irish potato famine was act of imperial policy - not act of God

What the British call the ‘Great Potato Famine’ and the Irish ‘An Ghorta Mhor’ (‘The Great Hunger’) - took place between 1845 and 1848.
Estimates differ but at least one million died from starvation or malnutrition-induced illness with a further million-and-a-half fleeing the ‘most distressful country’ to Australia, the US and all points of the compass.
Of the emigrants, it is thought that some 400,000 perished on board the horrors know as ‘coffin ships’.
The famine resulted in a decline in the Irish population, so severe that even today it has not recovered its 1841 level.
If we are to believe the imperialists, the catastrophe was caused mainly by the failure of the potato crop exacerbated by muddled administration by an essentially well-meaning ruling class.
However, the reality was that as the Irish peasantry were dying in the ditches, the land around them produced wheat, corn, dairy produce, with great herds of cattle, pigs, goats and poultry - enough food to feed three times its 1841 population.
Yet we are to believe that a blight affecting only the potato crop could eliminate 25 per cent of the population in the space of three years.
The ghastly truth is that hunger was a result of policy decisions and the 1845 events were jut the most tragic of what was a recurring theme in England’s colonial rule in Ireland.
Between 1722 and 1879 there were no less than 29 ‘famines’ and the feature of each one of these great tragedies to the Irish nation was that alongside them the great estates of Ireland - owned by the colonial masters - were producing and exporting to England sufficient produce to feed three times the Irish population.
It is this brutal fact that gives lie to the British myth that famine was caused by an Irish population too stupid to diversify their crops.
The truth is closer to the view expressed by John Mitchell, writing in 1861 while The Great Hunger was still fresh in peoples‚ minds.
In his book The Last Conquest of Ireland, he was the first to argue the case for genocide. He wrote:
“A million and a half men, women and children were carefully and peacefully slain by the English government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance, which their own hands created.”
Shocking as it is, there is little doubt that genocide, the eradication of the Irish nation, was the official policy of the English conquests from the end of the 16th and through the 17th century, through the implementation of the transplantation schemes.
An idea proposed by the English Viceroy, Sir Arthur Chichester, writing on 22 November 1601, to Lord Burghly. Elizabeth’s chief adviser, was specific:
“I have often said, and written, it is Famine which must consume them; our swords and other endeavours work not that speedy effect which is expected for their overthrow.”
It was during this period, these devastating conquests, that the Irish became reliant on potatoes as a staple diet.
The potato found its way into Ireland in the 1590s. As the English conquering armies fought back and fro across Ireland, driving people from the land, and, of course, with the notorious transplantation schemes.
Wheat and corn, cattle, pigs and other livestock could be captured, driven off or destroyed by the English.
The discovery of the potato was a godsend. It yielded more food per acre than other crops, was highly nutritious, and introduced security for the people.
Most importantly it grew underground and was thus hidden from the rampaging soldiers so that when they left the area, the people could return and dig it up.
By the 18th century over half of the Irish population was solely dependent on the potato. But the lifesaving tuber was also a means of destruction.
With the Williamite Conquest and the introduction of the Penal Laws, 95 per cent of Irish land was in the lands of the conquerors. The Penal Laws applied not only to Irish Catholics but also to all Irish Dissenting Protestants.
Only Anglicans had rights in Ireland. During the 18th Century, some 1,500 absentee landlords owned 3.25million acres of Irish land, and they lived in London. A further 4.25million acres of Irish land was in the lands of another 4,500 absentee landlords who chose Dublin as their home.
After the 1801 Union of the colonial parliament with London, the landlords made for London where, by the 1840s, 6,000 were living and their average income from their Irish estates was between £25,000 and £30,000 per year - a stupendous sum for the time.
The Irish were reduced to a serf population, working on the great estates, usually for middlemen who managed the estates for the landlords.
It was not until 1771 that an Act was passed allowing Catholic Irish to lease up to 50 acres of unprofitable bogland, at a distance of not less than a mile from any major habitation, and for no more than 21 years.
The 21 years allowed them to break in the land and then have it seized by the colonialists.
The first significant ‘famine’ began in 1722. Blight attacked the potato crop. Rural workers could not afford to buy food from the landlords at the commercial prices and so began to starve to death.
Deaths from the famines of 1722, 1726, 1728 and 1738 were measured in the tens of thousands. But in 1741 half a million people died from malnutrition and related disease.
That year of 1741 became known as Bliadhan an Áir - the Year of the Slaughter. One contemporary writer tells us:
“Want and misery is in every face, the rich unwilling to relieve the poor, the roads spread with dead and dying bodies. Many, the colour of the docks and nettles which they feed on.”
Other famines followed in 1765, 1770, 1774 and 1783. Again the deaths were counted in the tens of thousands and figures barely recorded. More famines followed in 1800, 1807 and 1822.
As William Cobbett the great English radical wrote in his Political Register, July, 1822:
“Money, it seems, is wanted in Ireland. Now people do not eat money. No, but the money will buy them something to eat. What? The food is there, then. Pray, observe this: and let the parties get out of the concern if they can.
“The food is there; but those who have it in their possession will not give it without money.
“And we know that the food is there; for since this famine has been declared in parliament, thousands of quarters of corn have been imported every week from Ireland to England.”
Further death-dealing ‘famine’ occurred in 1830 more or less lasting through to 1834 and then another in 1836 before the ‘Great Hunger’ of 1845-48.
It was the London Times of 26 June 1845 that pointed out:
“They are suffering a real though artificial famine. Nature does her duty; the land is fruitful enough, nor can it be fairly said that man is wanting.
“The Irishman is disposed to work; in fact, man and nature together do produce abundantly.
“The island is full and overflowing with human food. But something ever intervenes between the hungry mouth and the ample banquet.”
That ‘something’ was the colonial landlord who used the army and also armed police to protect the ample produce from the starving people.
A starving woman was crossing one of the fields of Sir George Colthurst of Ardrum, County Cork when she saw a single turnip overlooked on the soil and picked it up.
She was arrested and brought before the magistrates at Blarney and fined 20 shillings.
She had probably never seen so large a sum in her life. Unable to pay, she was transported to the penal colonies.
Between 1845 and 1853 alone, records show that landlords evicted 87,123 families because they could not afford to pay their rents.
In the end it was a determined tenants’ movement waging a land-war that brought some relief and ended the famine policy, at least in Ireland.