Africa’s Need for Food Tests Limits of U.S. Emergency Aid

A bill in Congress seeks slightly more than $1 billion to help prevent further starvation.

Efforts to aid Africa’s famine victims may tax U.S. private and public sources to their limits and still fall short of the overwhelming need for food. The virtual absence of food production in drought-stricken areas is matched by intractable transportation problems and poor government relations between Western nations and Marxist states such as Ethiopia.

Demand already has outstripped the U.S. government’s budgeted cash supply for natural disaster relief. “All available worldwide emergency funds for fiscal 1985 have been spent,” said Corinne Whitaker of Bread for the World (BFW), a Washington-based lobby. “It is critical that more resources be made available, both in food aid and non-food aid such as transportation, medicine, and agricultural recovery projects.”

Drawing on the surplus grain it buys from American farmers, the government has pledged 50,000 metric tons to Ethiopia alone, where the largest mass of starving people live. Half of the $200 million spent by the U.S. government for emergency aid has gone to Ethiopia, where an estimated 7.75 million people survive on the brink of starvation.

Another 550,000 tons are pledged for distribution by private organizations, in an agreement negotiated with the Ethiopian government by World Vision International president Tom Houston and representatives of Catholic and Lutheran relief agencies. Private initiatives are coordinated by Interaction, a coalition of some 120 agencies, many of which are church related.

Finding new sources of money is an urgent task facing both the government and private-sector groups involved in famine relief. A bill requesting slightly more than $1 billion has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, and newly elected Illinois Democratic Senator Paul Simon is pressing for a similar measure in the Senate.

Arthur Simon, brother of the new senator and head of BFW, called on the Reagan administration to take “extraordinary means” before Christmas to ship food abroad much more quickly than the three to four months usually required for delivery. Arthur Simon, and relief workers in Africa, feared that 200,000 people would die without stepped-up aid initiatives. A group of 150 religious leaders endorsed the call for extra efforts, which include:

• An airlift to deliver food and equipment to remote areas with poor, or nonexistent, road networks, such as the interior of Chad, where half the population of 4.6 million risk starvation.

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• Helicopters to transport food to refugees in Sudan, where they have fled from famine conditions in Chad and Ethiopia.

• Redirecting of nonemergency grain shipments headed for other destinations to the hardest-hit regions.

• Development of an internationally coordinated plan to reduce the number of deaths—estimated in some areas at 6,400 every day.

In response to the call, 300,000 tons of grain from the U.S. emergency grain reserve were earmarked for Africa. The government has leased commercial airplanes patterned after military cargo planes to ease transportation dilemmas. The government holds four million tons of grain in reserve, and agriculture experts say there is substantially more than that in private reserves held by farmers. No reliable accounting of all privately held grain is kept. A group of Iowa farmers contributed 2,000 metric tons, and farm organizations in European Economic Community nations continue to offer grain.

Oklahoma evangelist Larry Jones, president of Feed the Children, is leading an effort to tap into privately held grain reserves. With the support of Oklahoma’s U.S. senators, David Boren, a Democrat, and Don Nickles, a Republican, Jones is appealing to U.S. churches and synagogues to purchase surplus grain from farmers and send it to Africa.

At a Washington, D.C., press conference, Jones reported on a week-long visit he made to Ethiopian villages. “I have never witnessed suffering and death on such a magnitude as I saw it in Ethiopia,” he said. Also, because surplus amounts of grain keep prices artificially low and endanger the average farmer’s economic stability, Jones said churches should step into the gap. “I know of no greater obscenity in the world than for us to sit on this huge surplus while little children across the sea die by the thousands.”

Working in cooperation with 500 churches, Feed the Children supplies food, clothing, and medicine primarily to needy countries in Latin America. Jones said his group can arrange for grain to be shipped and distributed. “We can’t expect our farmers to feed the world for free, and I am pleased that your proposal recognizes this important fact that so many fail to acknowledge,” Boren wrote to Jones.

However, others in Washington question whether Jones’s plan will work. Ray Waggoner, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s stabilization and conservation service, said he doubts whether one person could overcome the logistic and political obstacles. “He would need to make arrangements with entities in charge of moving the grain. That is feasible, but it is not something that is done every day. He would have to deal with governments, and that would be the most difficult part. It might be best to coordinate with groups already negotiating with those governments.”

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The Ethiopian government, for example, continues to wage a propaganda war against the United States and does not acknowledge that America is providing far more grain and supplies than any other nation. Ethiopia allies itself closely with the Soviet Union, which pledged 10,000 tons of food aid last year—a fraction of the U.S. pledge.

Western relief workers there are chagrined by government relocation policies that force severely malnourished people out of mountainous regions and into central Ethiopia where new feeding centers will have to be established. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian government convened a meeting of representatives from 19 donor nations and 30 voluntary agencies to berate them for doing too little.

The Horn of Africa, where Ethiopia is located, has suffered acute drought for 20 years and weathered a severe famine in 1973 and 1974. A decade of deteriorating agricultural conditions and nationalized policies that failed to work brought about the current crisis.

Relief workers and analysts say there is no easy solution. “This famine is going to be with us for a number of years,” said Mary Ruth Herbers of the House Select Committee on Hunger. “What we really need is money,” she said, channeled through cooperative efforts like Interaction and directed at organizations positioned to make a difference. The address of Interaction and other private groups on the scene follow.

Africa Fund

Interaction

Box 1677

New York, New York 10009

CARE

660 First Avenue

New York, New York 10016

Catholic Relief Services

P.O. Box 2045

Church Street Station

New York, New York 10008

World Relief