Left behind to starve

Catholic New Times, April 20, 2003 by George Monbiot

A humanitarian disaster is engulfing Africa as cash is poured into the war with Iraq and its aftermath.

There is surely no more obvious symptom of the corruption of western politics than the disproportion between the money available for sustaining life and the money available for terminating it. We could, I think, expect that, if they were asked to vote on the matter, most of the citizens of the rich world would demand that their governments spend as much on humanitarian aid as they spend on developing new means of killing people. But the military-industrial complex is a beast which becomes both fiercer and greedier the more it is fed.

As the United States spends some $12 billion a month on bombing the Iraqis, it has so far offered only $65 million to provide them with food, water, sanitation, shelter and treatment for the injuries they are likely to receive. A confidential UN contingency plan for Iraq, which was leaked in January, suggests that the war could expose around one million children to "risk of death from malnutrition." It warns that "the collapse of essential services in Iraq could lead to a humanitarian emergency of proportions well beyond the capacity of UN agencies and other aid organizations."

Around 60 per cent of the population is entirely dependent on the oil for food programme, administered by the Iraqi government. This scheme was suspended by the UN at the beginning of war, leaving the Iraqis reliant on foreign aid. The money pledged so far is enough to sustain the Iraqis for less than a fortnight.

It is hard to believe, however, that the U.S. government will leave them to starve once it has captured their country. For the weeks or months during which Iraq dominates the news, the U.S. will be obliged to defend them from the most immediate impacts of the institutional collapse its war is causing. Afterwards, like the people of Afghanistan, the Iraqis will be first forgotten by the media and then deserted by those who promised to support them.

The war is causing a global humanitarian crisis. As donor countries set aside their aid budgets to save both themselves and the United States from embarrassment under the camera lights in Baghdad, they have all but ceased to provide money to other nations. The world, as a result, could soon be confronted by a humanitarian funding crisis graver than any since the end of the Second World War.

Every year, in November, the UN agencies which deal with disasters launch what they call a "consolidated appeal" for each of the countries suffering a "complex emergency." They expect to receive the money they request by May of the following year. The payments and promises they have extracted so far chart the collapse of international concern for the people of almost every nation except Iraq.

In Eritrea, for example, the drought is so severe that the water table has fallen by ten metres. Most of the nation's crops have failed and grain prices have doubled. Seventy per cent of its 3.3 million people are now classified as vulnerable to famine. The United Nations has asked the rich countries for $163 million to help them. It has received $4 million, or 2.5 per cent of the money it requested.

Burundi, where almost one sixth of the inhabitants have been forced out of their homes by conflict and natural disasters, and which is now officially listed as the third poorest nation on earth, has received 3 per cent of its UN request. Liberia, where rebels have rendered much of the western part of the country uninhabitable, forcing some 500,000 people out of their homes, has been given 1.2 per cent; Sierra Leone, where lassa fever is now rampaging through the refugee camps, has received 1 per cent; and Guinea, which has recently taken 82,000 refugees from Cote d'Ivoire, 0.4 per cent. Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo have all received less than 6 per cent.

Much of the money for these invisible countries has come from donor nations with relatively small economies, such as Sweden, Norway, Canada and Ireland. "The state of Africa", Tony Blair told his party conference in October 2001, "is a scar on the conscience of the world, but if the world focused on it, we could heal it." Well, let it now be a scar on the conscience of Tony Blair.

As a result of this unprecedented failure by the rich nations to cough up, the people of the forgotten countries will, very soon, begin to starve to death. The UN has warned that "a break in supplies" to Eritrea "is now inevitable." The World Food Programme has sorted feeding fewer people here, but will run out of food within two months. In Burundi it can, it says, continue feeding people "for another four weeks." Beans will run out in Liberia this month; cereals in day 9. One hundred thousand refugees in Guinea could find themselves without food by August 10. Yet neither of the two governments, which are about to launch a "humanitarian war," appear to be concerned by the impending humanitarian catastrophes in the world's poorest nations.

The aid crisis is now so serious that it is restricting disaster relief even in nations which are considered by the major powers to be geo-politically important. The UN agencies have so far received just 2.9 per cent of their request for Palestine, and 8.4 per cent of the money they need in Afghanistan.