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| The
Nepad Initiative: Famine and Conquest in Africa |
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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.
July 02, 2002. |
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