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Recent months have witnessed
two significant developments in the African continent. One,
the re-emergence of food shortages in southern Africa,
posing a real threat of famine in the region. Two, the
launch of the New Partnership for African Development (Nepad),
a programme framed by the joint effort of several African
governments (led by Nigeria, South Africa, Algeria and
Senegal) which is aimed at accelerating growth and reducing
poverty in the region. The Nepad initiative, which was
discussed at the Group of 8 (G8) summit in Kananaskis,
Canada, will require extra aid-led funding of $64 billion a
year if it is to meet its objective of achieving an annual
growth rate of 7 per cent so as to reduce by half the number of those living in extreme poverty by
the year 2015.
These two developments are not unrelated. The vulnerability
of African countries to the threat of famine explains the
nature of the Nepad initiative. It also explains the
contrast between the eagerness with which African
governments have pushed the Nepad programme and the tepid
response it has received from the developed countries which
are required to support it with the necessary finance.
The current threat of famine in Africa is real. According to
reports, the regional director of the World Food Program has
stated that southern Africa has not faced such widespread
food shortages since the early 1990s, when a severe drought
had struck the region. Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Lesotho
have already likened the situation in their countries to a
national calamity, and Mozambique and Swaziland are
reportedly on the brink of a disaster. What is worse, there
is little hope that the food crisis can be solved during the
coming year. The survival of close to 5 million people is
estimated at present to be dependent on flows of food aid.
According to an end-April estimate of the World Food Program,
about 145,000 tons of food, costing $69 million, are needed
to tide over the coming months, as against the mere $3
million that had been pledged till then.
Famine or near-famine conditions in parts of Africa are by
now almost routine phenomena. And, invariably, at every
instance of crisis, as governments and international
organizations issue alerts and television crews capture
gruesome pictures of starving children, animal carcasses and
half-abandoned villages, the international community of
governments, aid agencies and NGOs are stirred to action, to
alleviate the damage. But the fundamental challenge of
Africa's continued vulnerability remains unaddressed, as is
revealed once again by this year's situation.
There are widely differing views on the reasons for southern
Africa's endemic problem of food insecurity. We must recall
here that the African countries have by no means been
recalcitrant in implementing strategies that the World Bank,
the IMF and the G8 recommend. Many of them have undergone
several rounds of stabilization and structural adjustment,
and are now among the most ‘open' developing countries. This
obviously implies that whatever be the sources of the
weakness that leads to situations of extreme food insecurity
in the African continent, neo-liberal policies have by no
means helped redress them. On the contrary, these policies,
which have denuded government revenues and limited public
expenditures by curtailing deficits, have contributed to
squeezing the much-needed public investments in the
agricultural sector. They have also resulted in a shift in favour of cash-crop production that reduces the acreage
under staple foodcrops, thus worsening food security.
The adoption of a
neo-liberal policy framework by the Sub-Saharan African (SSA)
countries in the 1980s forced them to engage in a primary exports thrust that resulted in export growth rates
of 6 to 14 per cent per annum. But this had major negative
implications for the structure of agricultural production.
According to Utsa Patnaik, per capita foodgrains production
in the SSA region fell through the decade of the 1980s and
stagnated during the 1990s. Using
UN data on cereals plus tubers and plantains, she found that
in the six most populous countries of Sub-Saharan Africa,
accounting for over three-fifths of the region's population,
cereals output fell by 33 per cent in the second half of the
eighties and all-food output fell by one-fifth. For the
entire region (forty-six
countries), cereal output declined by 16.6 per cent and
all-food output by nearly 12 per cent. The per head annual
gross cereal output, which was already low, at 156 kg, to
begin with, fell to even lower levels, coming down to 137 kg
in 1990. The situation has not improved since. Given this
background, it is not surprising that the region remains
susceptible to famine.
This
aspect of recent African history tends to be ignored among
the causal explanations that abound when famine sweeps the
countries in the region. This time around, too, the reasons
being cited for the food crisis range from bad weather
conditions to wars and civil strife, and even to Mugabe's
belated move to reclaim land from the whites that belonged
originally to the black population. These factors taken
together, it is argued, explain the failure of local
governments and the world community to ensure that a region
that has been subjected to periodic rounds of neo-liberal
'reform' has not been able to overcome the basic
vulnerability that food insecurity implies.
In actual fact, however, the evidence regarding the
contribution made by the policies imposed by the Bretton
Woods institutions is even starker now. Consider, for
example, the case of Malawi. The country's 11 million people
consume a little more than 2 million metric tons of maize,
the staple, in a year. In normal years, Malawi's farmers
produce enough and more to service this demand.
Unfortunately, floods in 2000-01 and drought the next year
reduced maize output to an estimated 1.7 and 1.5 million
metric tons, respectively. But this too need not have posed
a problem, since surpluses from earlier years had been held
as stock to meet such shortfalls.
The food crisis in Malawi has arisen because, as part of the
conditions set under the IMF-World Bank's debt relief initiative for highly indebted poor countries,
the Muluzi government was forced, in August 2000, to sell
abroad the whole of its 167,000 tons of maize reserves,
ostensibly to reduce government spending and enhance foreign
exchange reserves. If the government had not disposed of
these stocks, the problems created by the floods and drought
of the last two years could have been dealt with. But with
the maize stocks having been cleared thus, the threat of
famine and acute dependence on food aid has become real. The
IMF blames the government's optimistic harvest forecasts for
2001 as being responsible for the crisis, while
organizations like Save the Children Fund, besides the
Malawi government, squarely blame the IMF for the current
distress of the people of Malawi.
The tragedy is that Africa's vulnerability, created in the
first instance by the neo-liberal policy package recommended
by the World Bank and the IMF, provides the basis for
further inroads into the continent by these very agencies.
While, on the surface, the effort to alleviate the
debilitating consequences of food shortage and famine is
coordinated by agencies such as the World Food Program and
the NGO community, the financial support required to put in
place a reasonable effort must come from the G8 and
multilateral institutions. This provides an opportunity for
all of them to exercise their leverage and, further, push
through policies of the kind that contributed to the crisis
in the first place. Moreover, it also becomes an occasion to
target any initiative that the developed countries find
unpalatable.
In Zimbabwe, for example, the shortfall in corn, created by
a combination of factors -- erratic rainfall and the shift
out of maize cultivation by white 'commercial farmers'
threatened by the land seizure movement – presents a
situation that is difficult but not impossible to handle.
Since the deficit this year is estimated to be around 1.5
million tons, the remedial effort has to be massive and
requires support from western governments. But this support
is not forthcoming because the developed countries are
'unhappy' with President Mugabe's land seizure policies and
alleged 'rigging' of the recent election, which saw
Zimbabwe's government lose the support of some African
friends (especially South Africa's Thabo Mbeki) and its
membership of the Commonwealth. Therefore, the food problem
has turned serious. Mugabe's battle is against what he sees
to be hypocrisy on the part of western governments, who have
singled him out as a symbol of misgovernance even as they
support corrupt governments elsewhere, with the real reason
for their opposition being his land seizure policies, The
net result is that food aid has been slow to reach Zimbabwe,
for western interests are now looking to the emergence of a
new government there.
For a continent that is not just vulnerable but has been
virtually battered into aid dependence, such exploitation
and conversion of moments of vulnerability into moments of
leverage has proved difficult to withstand. Their weak
position has forced many of the governments in the region
to internalize the policies recommended by the IMF and the
World Bank and to treat them as their own, in the hope that
they will be able to obtain western support in times of
crisis and derive some marginal benefits from the process of
globalization in the medium term. This tendency to
internalize the neo-liberal doctrines purveyed by the
Bretton Woods twins and the G8 governments they represent
has obviously been welcomed by the latter. It saves them the
embarrassment of facing accusations like those being made in
Malawi, where the obvious link between debt-relief
conditionalities and the current crisis (via sale of food
surpluses abroad) has revealed the damaging impact of IMF-style
programmes.
Not surprisingly, the process of internalization of
neo-liberal policies and western interests is now being
sought to be institutionalized. One form that such
institutionalization has taken (and is taking) is the
Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper mechanism, according to
which domestic governments were expected, based on a
participatory process involving local bodies and civil society organizations, to develop a growth and
poverty alleviation strategy as a prerequisite for
consideration for funding. This had two advantages. First,
it foregrounded the smokescreen of poverty reduction,
thereby helping to conceal the inherently inequalizing
tendencies of neo-liberal growth policies. Second, instead
of viewing such policies as imposed from outside through IMF-style
conditionalities, governments implicitly claimed ownership
of them.
In Africa this use of the smokescreen of poverty reduction
and the transition to policy ownership has assumed
continental dimensions, in the form of the New Partnership
for African Development initiative. The partnership, between
African governments and the G8, aims at overcoming Africa's
underdevelopment and 'exclusion' and, of course, Africa's
poverty, by embracing the process of globalization and
ensuring better governance. Embracing globalization implies,
in practice, furthering the marketist regime that has been
imposed on these countries in the past and which has been
responsible for many of their problems. And better
governance implies a process of 'peer review' of governments
to ensure that they follow western-style 'democratic'
practices. The first casualty of such 'peer review' was
Zimbabwe's membership of the Commonwealth.
This internalization of the problem-solving process
essentially implies that international inequality, unequal
trade and the hegemony of developed countries will not be
seen as constraints to the development process. Thus, while
in the past developments such as those that occurred in
Malawi would have been seen as a consequence of dependence
and domination, which needs to be opposed, in the future,
they could be attributed to internal policies or the failure
of governance. The IMF, for example, would not have to
argue, as it did in Malawi, that the 'original sin' was an erroneous forecast of harvest by government
agencies. The Malawi government itself would in all
probability admit to the same, or be 'peer reviewed' into
accepting the same. This ability on the part of governments
of developed countries to
push or buy out Africa's elite to fully 'own' the processes
that impoverish their people,
is imperialism's greatest post-War success yet in the
African continent.
However, given the vulnerability of most African nations,
some developed countries, especially the US, for whom Africa
is strategically not that important, are not even willing to
pay a price for their victory. Despite the estimates made by
the Africans 'themselves' that the Nepad programme needs
additional annual support of $64 billion, the Africa Action
Plan agreed upon at the recent Kananaskis summit only
incorporated a commitment to direct half the increase in G8
aid budgets (by $12
billion by 2006) announced at Monterrey to Africa – a sum
rightly dismissed as 'peanuts' by many NGOs, including Oxfam
and Cafod. The Action Plan declared: 'Assuming strong
African policy commitments, and given recent assistance
trends, we believe that in aggregate half or more of our new
development assistance could be directed to African nations
that govern justly, invest in their own people and promote
economic freedom.' However, under pressure from the US, it
left each developed country's commitment flexible. 'Each of
us will decide, in accordance with our respective priorities
and procedures, how we will allocate the additional money we
have pledged', the Plan said. Further, the US National Securty Adviser Condoleezza Rice's
'assurance', that more
than half of US international aid could go to Africa if the
African nations implemented their promise to pursue good
governance, clearly underscores the rationale on which such
commitments are premised: it is when the victim is most
vulnerable that he can be easily battered into total
submission. |
