- Plumes of yellow flowers stand erect from the cassia
trees that line the avenues of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. Vivid red-leaved
poinsettias 20ft wide grow beside the road and banana, paw-paw and avocado
trees are laden with fruit. This is a land of abundant produce, so how
is it starving?
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- The weather is cold and grey, much like England. Occasionally,
the cloud breaks and there is a shaft of hot, delicious sun ñ but
where is the heat and dust and drought that are the harbingers of famine?
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- These are the first of many puzzles about Malawi. Its
climate is equable, its vegetation exuberant, its people are at peace.
Why should it suffer a food shortage? And who exactly is short of food?
Discovering the truth is not easy.
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- I arrived in Lilongwe in early June, expecting to find
a country mobilising to deal with the imminent threat of starvation. Twenty
million are said to be at risk across southern Africa ñ 3 million
of them in Malawi ñ from a combination of drought, pestilence, war,
corruption and famine. Instead, I found a government locked in a constitutional
row about the re-election of the President for a third term and an aid
community bemused by the international focus on the country and unsure
how to respond to it
-
- Malawi is hungry and many of its people are desperately
so but it is not starving ñ not yet. Veterans of the "scorched
earth" famines of Ethiopia in 1984 and the Sudan in 1990 insist nothing
on that scale has been seen so far in Malawi. Senior executives of the
aid agencies in Britain, who have launched disaster appeals to raise funds
for southern Africa, are privately worried that this scepticism from professionals
on the ground will undermine their efforts.
-
- The chief executive of a British-based charity told me
last week: "I am confident we can persuade the public to give now
to stave off the crisis that will otherwise come in November but if the
people out there start questioning our efforts that could be very damaging."
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- I spent 10 days touring Malawi, visiting hospital malnutrition
clinics and villages in the bush where crops have failed and I saw many
children with the dry hair, puffy hands and feet and protruding bellies
that are the signs of malnutrition. I saw sick elderly grandparents who
face a daily struggle to find food for young children whose parents are
dead, victims of Aids. I met villagers whose crops had been stolen because
the price of maize, the staple food, is rising and the hungry are growing
more desperate. I saw homes preparing maize husks ñ the "hunger
food" made from the chaff around the grain normally fed to chickens
but used in lean years to tide over families to the next harvest.
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- But the hunger is not universal. Even in the same village,
some have enough and others do not. Moreover, hunger is an annual phenomenon.
According to the Demographic and Health Survey 2000, published by the Malawian
National Statistics Office, severe malnourishment affects 26 per cent of
under-fives in rural areas and 13 per cent in urban areas ñ the
result of years of food shortages.
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- Hunger, disease and poverty exact an annual cull of the
population in Malawi. The difference this year is that the cull has started
early, in May and June, which should be a time of plenty. At Mulanje mission
hospital in the south, 900 children were seen in the malnutrition clinic
in May, a record for that month, when the numbers should be falling.
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- At Chitambi, a large village of 50 houses four miles
from the Mulanje-Blantyre road, people were forced to bring in their crops
early this year partly out of hunger and partly to protect them from thieves.
Agnes Renard was drying maize husks outside her home and several houses
had mats of millet drying, normally used for brewing beer but used as a
substitute food when maize is short.
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- The village chief, an elderly, frail man wearing a double-
breasted blue jacket and brown trousers rolled to the knee, had planted
a small plot of maize in front of his house, instead of in the fields,
so he could guard it from thieves. "I only depend on God. Whatever
God prepares I accept. Only God knows the future," he said.
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- To some, this fatalism can seem exasperating. If you
are starving what should you do? Sit and wait for death, at God's convenience,
or go and search for food elsewhere? Malawi has one of the largest freshwater
lakes in the world with water for crops and an abundance of fish. Why not
move to the lake?
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- But this is to misunderstand the predicament. Where life
is hard, communities learn to endure. Stoicism is their strength. They
have no resources, no savings, nothing with which to pay for a fishing
net or seed or fertiliser or transport to enable them to start again. Yet
they remain cheerful and dignified, not gloomy and downcast, laughing in
the face of hardship. That is the African miracle. Those that have little,
share even the little that they have. They move slowly and work little,
conserving energy. But they survive.
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- I asked Grace Malenga, head of the Moyoh House malnutrition
clinic at Queen Elizabeth hospital, Blantyre, to gauge the position. Behind
her, solemn-faced children lay inert in the ward where beds had been crammed
together in pairs to increase capacity.
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- Dr Malenga smiled patiently. She has answered this question
many times. "I can say that where today we have 20 patients, five
years ago we may have had 10. But what does that tell you? Distinguishing
the effects of a food crisis from the effects of malaria, HIV and tuberculosis
is very difficult. If a child is weakened by lack of food then they will
be more likely to succumb to disease."
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- She paused, then added: "However, I am a Malawian
villager and when I go to my village I can see, yes, the situation is quite
desperate. It is not so desperate now but it will be in a few months. There
is simply not enough food."
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- I told her I had seen maize husks being prepared in the
village of Chitambi. "If they are using maize husks now, that is very
serious. This is the time to throw them to the chickens. October, November,
December ñ that is the time to use maize husks ñ when there
is no maize left to eat."
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- The food crisis is deepened by the Malawian passion for
nsima, the staple food, made from maize flour into patties that have the
appearance and bland taste of solid semolina. It is a comfort food, filling
the belly and warming the blood in a country stalked by hunger, where the
nights can be cold. Malawians say if a man hasn't eaten nsima, he hasn't
eaten.
-
- But maize is a fragile plant, susceptible to drought
and flood, and constant cultivation of the crop drains the soil of nutrients.
Efforts to persuade Malawians to diversify and grow other crops such as
cassava have had limited success up to this point.
-
- The Malawian government has been blamed for selling off
its entire food reserves of 167,000 tons but it would have been insufficient
to cover the current shortfall estimated at 600,000 tons. Britain, too,
must share the blame. It provided "starter packs" to every farmer
in 1998 and 1999 containing seeds and fertiliser but, after record harvests,
the price of maize plummeted. Farmers stopped growing the crop because
there was no incentive.
-
- In 2000, starter packs were given only to the neediest
1.5 million farmers, which went down to 1 million in 2001. That decision
proved disastrous. This year's harvest, hindered by poor weather, came
in at 1.4 million tons, compared with the 2 million tons needed to feed
the country.
-
- Mike Wood, the head of the UK Department for International
Development in Malawi, said: "The Government complained that the decline
[in farmers targeted with starter packs] was too steep. Our view is that
if we hadn't done what we did there wouldn't be any farmers growing maize.
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- "Unfortunately for everyone, the decline coincided
with poor weather and harvests."
-
- The story illustrates the difficulty facing donors wanting
to help without undermining a country's capacity to help itself.
-
- Last February, the food shortage was the gravest for
a decade, and President Bakili Muluzi declared a crisis. The price of maize
doubled, millions went hungry and an untold number died.
-
- This year, the lean months of December, January and February
that lie ahead look certain to be worse ñ unless urgent action is
taken now. Mike Wood estimates about half of the 600,000 tons shortfall
is covered by commitments from donors. The rest, the Government is hoping,
will be brought in by commercial organisations to sell on the open market.
But the economy is in meltdown with inflation running at 20-plus per cent
and interest rates as high as 50 per cent, so there is little incentive
for businessmen to take the risk.
-
- In that case, we may yet witness a famine to rival any
seen in Africa in many years.
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- A COUNTRY'S BURDEN
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- ï Aids is stripping African nations of breadwinners.
The infection rate in Malawi is approaching one in five ñ one in
two among adults above 30. Only the old and the young are left. Rural areas
are also losing young, able-bodied farm workers who move to town.
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- ï The population is growing in spite of Aids
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- ï Though the rate of population growth has been
cut from 5 per cent to 2 per cent a year, attendance at family planning
clinics is dropping in rural areas. "No one would go to buy contraceptives
when there is no food in the house," said Walter Jiyani, director
of family planning agency Banja La Mtsogolo.
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- ï The average for a Malawi women is six to seven
children. Infant mortality is 150 per 1,000 live births (compared with
less than six per 1,000 in Britain). Maternal mortality has doubled in
the past five years (from 620 per 100,000 births in 1997 to 1,120 in 2001),
fuelled by Aids, nursing shortages and lack of care. A woman in Malawi
who has the average of six to seven children stands a one in 13 chance
of dying during childbirth.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=312978
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