Ben Wisner, hazards specialist with the Environmental Studies programme at Oberlin College, Ohio argues that World Bank pressure helped to cause the southern African food crisis. He says that when drought hit the region in 1991, there was remarkable cooperation among all the affected countries but now they are in the grip of an HIV-AIDS epidemic, electoral democracy is under pressure, and state institutions are weak.

Ninety per cent of Malawi's 11 million population live by subsistence agriculture in the countryside. This country, like all of southern Africa, began its third year of drought in 2002 in some parts of the country, and was also still recovering from 2001 floods in other areas. Malawi is landlocked, highly indebted, and among the least developed by U.N. standards. There were early warnings by aid organisations of a famine on the scale of Ethiopia's tragedy in 1984, or an earlier famine that elderly Malawians may remember from 1948.

Piecing reports from agencies working in rural areas together, as many as 10,000 people, mostly the weak -- children, the aged, people living with AIDS -- may already have died by May 2002. The U.N. Food Programme (WFP) estimated that up to three million were at risk, that 70% of the population was affected, and that Malawi would require 600,000 tonnes of food to finish up 2002.

HIV-AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhoea, and an epidemic of cholera further weakened the population during 2002, intensifying the health consequences of hunger. The cholera epidemic is the worst in the history of Malawi, with 32,968 cases reported and 980 deaths by 7 April, 2002, according to the WFP.

Many AIDS orphans and those living with HIV already had poor nutrition even before this current crisis. In some parts of the country elephants and hippopotami have invaded irrigated plots in search of food, and some people have also been forced by desperation to steal food from fields. Where farmers have been successful in growing some maize and protecting it from animal or human thieves, hunger has forced them to harvest it before it is mature.

Malawi has attempted to follow a Post War development model as a path to both economic and human development. In the past it exported labour to the South African mines (highly prized as "tropicals" who could tolerate the heat in the deepest mine shafts) who remitted income. It exports tea. Its government has attempted to implement a World Bank structural adjustment package aimed at streamlining government expenditure.

However, much of the rural population remains isolated, without basic services, and at the mercy of an uncontrolled market through which the price of maize (the staple food crop) has increased by 400%, says the WFP. This put purchase of food -- even when hungry farmers sell off all their assets, including livestock, and even the roof timbers of their houses in "distress sales" -- beyond the reach of most of the hungry.

It is the failure of the government to intervene and control the staple food price and to import food in a timely manner, and to maintain a strategic reserve against such contingencies, that defines this event as a famine and not merely a "food emergency". In 2001 donors had told Malawi that it was inefficient to keep a large emergency reserve of food, so the government sold off 160,000 tonnes of maize and did not renew that supply.

When drought on this scale last affected southern Africa in 1991, there was a rare moment in which cooperation among all the affected countries, including South Africa, provided a window through which food aid poured in a remarkably efficient way. During the recovery period in the early 1990s numerous NGOs developed projects to build drought coping capacity. The transport infrastructure, communications, and political cooperation of the neighbouring countries at that time seemed a good example of the kind of regional resilience that development can provide in the face of disaster.

This time around the countries are in the grip of an every more serious epidemic of HIV-AIDS, electoral democracy is under serious pressure in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, and local institutions of the state are very weak.

Donor response to the appeal for food was weaker than it was in 1991, perhaps because of concerns with national executive capacity and accountability. The WFP was already feeding 2.6 million people in southern Africa in March 2002, when it appealed for U.S.$69 million for this emergency. According to a report by Agence France-Presse by the end of April 2002 it had received pledges of only $3 million.

This article was first published on the Radix website.

See our Food crisis in southern Africasection.

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