Africa, Taking Responsibility for Itself

Yet again the world is informed by the United Nations that countries in Africa are facing famine due to drought and the after-effects of war and civil unrest. Urgent appeals to the world community to respond to the UN's World Food Program to help, have become an almost annual expectation.

Emergency aid to Africa rises by 20% a year, representing $4-billion on an annual basis. Funding is becoming more difficult to extricate from countries desperate to pull themselves out of depression.

"It is simply very difficult to get money to fund the kinds of projects that will stop these crises developing, rather than being forced to ask for money when they have started." Cristina Amaral, UN Food and Agriculture Organization chief of emergency operations.

Climate change, overpopulation, weather catastrophes, whatever the cause the effect is dire and it is predictable. Proactively, perhaps much more could be done than is currently the case, with African countries doing little-to-nothing to promote better planning internally on their own, to stockpile seeds and grains, to balance the hydrated portions of their geographies with the drought-affected areas.

Food shortages due to crop failures as a result of drought conditions and other related concerns were foreseen, and alerts raised. Rain simply has not eventuated, rivers and lakes have not been replenished. Crops cannot grow, cattle cannot be fed. Nomadic herders are seeing their livestock dying off, and desperate small-crop farmers are forced to sell whatever meagre possessions they have, to buy food.

And the cost of food staples have risen throughout the world, further compounding an already dire emergency. Acute malnutrition is the spectre that haunts the West in photographs of malnourished and starving African children, spurring the conscience to act to provide relief to prevent mass tragedy.

There is a problem with overpopulation, both of human beings and of their livestock, to the extent that the frail economic conditions cannot sustain the abundance of both. Nature, in times of want, has its own way of treating such situations, by diminishing the numbers who must be fed, through starvation. International aid is being aimed at teaching African women to decide whether to have more children.

But conservative-funding wealthy countries often find fault with the concept of 'family planning' in third-world countries, although such concepts can assist women in deciding that fewer mouths to feed equals fewer future tragedies of loss. Countries whose populations are faced with the dangers of insufficient food on a repetitive basis should be prepared to find solutions.

Solutions cannot be found in agreeing to rent prime agricultural land out to China, for example, to bring in Chinese farm labourers to develop crops and harvest them and ship them back for consumption to China. Countries like Kenya and Ethiopia, whose populations face starvation, earn billions through agriculture and horticulture exports. Very little of those earnings trickle down.

These countries could build roads to see that whatever food that does grow reaches the local markets that need them. Meat processing plants located close to where herders walk their camels and goats make sense. It becomes a problem of exhorting African countries to be responsible for themselves, to develop and to institute measures useful to themselves and their populations.