FAMINE, HUNGER AND STARVATION IN AFRICA: Challenge To African and World Leaders

International Food Aid and its Effects

            “There is,” according to Walter Lippmann, “a…triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action.”¹ The scene of action is in Africa, and the picture is one of millions of Africans starving in Somalia, Sudan and more than twenty other African countries. The pictures of hungry Africans have been brought to Americans and the rest of the world via television, radio, newspapers, magazines and other media. The American government, public and various social and religious organizations have responded generously. But what is food aid? What are the effects of food aid, or any type of aid?

            Various views have been expressed with respect to America and other countries aiding Third World countries. There are those who advocate lifeboat ethics;² others spaceship ethics;³ yet still others who advocate humanitarianism, national interests, or political expediency. Lifeboat ethics does not favor the sharing of resources, and views starvation as essentially a national problem which must not be abated by those who are wealthy, premised on the notion that the lifeboat can contain only so many people. Those who advocate the spaceship concept view the world as a single cosmos that has interdependent constituents, one of which, when affected, affects the whole cosmos. The religious and the humanitarians see starvation in human terms, and can, to a certain extent, sympathize and empathize with human beings dying because of lack of food and water. Politicians mostly see food aid in terms of foreign policy, their national interests and political ideology.

            Generally, however, most Americans support the humanitarian concerns of aid to Third World countries and to Africa in particular. The young and well-educated segment of white America support food aid to Africa; African Americans, despite their general low economic and educational positions, are strong supporters of food aid to Africa, because perhaps they, more than most Americans, know how it feels to be hungry!

            American aid to foreign countries has had a long history, and has been used for several reasons. After World War II, the United States expended close to two percent of its GNP, the largest foreign aid so far, to reconstruct Europe and Japan. This was the Marshall Plan. “The intention of the Marshall Plan was to provide the United States with a first line of defense against possible Russian aggression.”⁴ At the time, the fear of the spread of communism to Western Europe was behind United States’ interests in providing such a massive aid and to a certain extent that fear of communism was the reason for U.S. aid to certain African countries in the 1960s or Post Colonial Africa. Sudan, Ghana, Zaire, Somalia, Kenya and Egypt could be cited as examples.

            In 1954, the United States government promulgated PL 480 to provide aid to poorer countries that were at the periphery of the communist countries. “PL 480 evolved from a surplus disposal program – a relief valve for U.S. policy to maintain farm incomes – to a program figuring prominently in efforts to achieve…international political economic aims in a world confronting food scarcities.”⁵

            Food aid was then a political weapon and was used to get rid of surplus grains that was costing the U.S. government money. “By the early 1960s, U.S. grain surpluses were running in excess of 230 million tons and were costing U.S. tax payers billions of dollars in payments for farmers and for storage costs each year.”⁶ Between 1965 and 1966, the United States contributed more than 10 billion tons of grain to India, and by 1969, India had gained self-sufficiency in grain production. By the 1970s, “food aid became an instrument, not primarily of aid for development, but U.S. foreign policy.”⁷ The decline in Soviet grain production in 1972 made food an international political commodity. As grain crops became scarce, producing countries such as the United States could use food as a political weapon and could select countries, based on ideological affinity, to which it chose to sell. As the oil-producing countries used their commodity for economic and political reasons, so did the United States use its food surplus. South Vietnam, Egypt and other countries received large tonnages of