Food Emergency: How the World Bank and IMF Have Made African Famine Inevitable

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Rania Khalek

Food Emergency: How the World Bank and IMF Have Made African Famine Inevitable
Lending policies pushed by the World Bank and IMF transformed a self-sufficient, food-producing Africa into a continent vulnerable to food emergencies and famine.

September 8, 2011 |


“Why, in a world that produces more than enough food to feed everybody, do so many – one in seven of us – go hungry?” -- Oxfam


Famine is spreading like wildfire throughout the horn of Africa. As 12 million people battle hunger, the UN warns that 750,000 people in Somalia face imminent death from starvation over the next four months, in the absence of outside intervention. Over the course of just 90 days, an estimated 29,000 children under the age of five died in Southern Somalia, with another 640,000 children suffering from acute malnourishment.

In the rush to find a culprit to blame for the tragedy unfolding in East Africa, the mainstream news outlets attributed the cause to record droughts, a rise in food prices, biofuel production and land grabs by foreign investors with an added emphasis on the role of the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab. Yet these factors alone are not responsible for the famine; instead they have intensified an already dire hunger crisis that has persisted in Sub-Saharan Africa for decades, thanks to lending policies pushed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) that transformed a self-sufficient, food-producing Africa into a continent dependent on imports and food aid, leaving the continent vulnerable to food emergencies and famine.

Since 1981, when these lending policies were first implemented, Oxfam found that the amount of sub-Saharan Africans surviving on less than one dollar a day doubled to 313 million by 2001, which is 46 percent of the population. Since the mid-1980s, the number of food emergencies per year on the continent has tripled.

According to Oxfam International spokesperson Caroline Pearce, the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs of the '80s and '90s led to “huge disinvestments in the agricultural sector.” Pearce concludes, “What we’re seeing now in poor agricultural systems partly relates to those kind of policies. In many cases, we’re actually calling for things to be reestablished that were dismantled under structural adjustment programs in the past.” ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/food/152335/food_emergency%3A_how_the_world_bank_and_imf_have_made_african_famine_inevitable_/

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[jwirr]

2. When we think that we can do a makeover of a culture into a US

form of culture we forget that it took us 300 years + our European background to get here and we are not doing so well.

From the beginning all those trying to help these countries should have started where they were at and listened to what they wanted instead of what WE wanted. I don't expect the IMF or the World Bank to see that though. They are staffed and funded by the WE and were not there to help but instead to see what WE could get out of it.

Edited to say that our small farm policies of the 1930s would have worked well. They would have kept the families on the farm and supporting themselves instead of setting in a city with no jobs.

[bvar22]

3. NATO has become the "Enforcement Arm"...

...of the IMF Global Loan Sharks.

” For all his dictatorial megalomania, Gaddafi is a committed pan-African - a fierce defender of African unity. Libya was not in debt to international bankers. It did not borrow cash from the International Monetary Fund for any "structural adjustment". It used oil money for social services - including the Great Man Made River project, and investment/aid to sub-Saharan countries. Its independent central bank was not manipulated by the Western financial system. All in all a very bad example for the developing world.”

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD27Ak01.html

You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their excuses.

Solidarity!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Igel]

4. They want me to agree.

Yet they don't provide enough facts to allow me to agree.

Take the following as a "for instance": "Since 1981, when these lending policies were first implemented, Oxfam found that the amount of sub-Saharan Africans surviving on less than one dollar a day doubled to 313 million by 2001, which is 46 percent of the population. Since the mid-1980s, the number of food emergencies per year on the continent has tripled."

It says that in some respects things have gotten worse. It doesn't say anything intelligent about causes. So the number of sub-Saharan Africans surviving on less than $!/day doubled. (1) Speak in terms of purchasing parity power and perhaps I could know what that means. (2) Use percentages consistently. So it's 46% of the population. Was it 23% in 1981? Lower than 46%? Higher than 46%? As it stands, that percentage is meaningless. (3) The number of people on less than $1/day doubled. Did the population decrease? Increase by 100%? 300% (4) The central claim is that IMF policies led to famine. But then the total sub-Saharan population is included. Is it true that every country in sub-Saharan Africa followed IMF policies? If not, why don't the writers just tell us the facts about the set of countries that they're claiming to give us facts about?

That's not even to mention government subsidies, inflation, changes in the labor force, an increased population, wars and other dislocations, etc., etc., etc. Let's not talk about how during the period with "average" food exports there were famines, evidence that the "averages" can be very misleading--but that we can compare a single year in a really meaningful way with a 45-year-old average. Some countries had problems producing enough food to feed their populations in 1981; their populations have increased by 100% or more since then, and we're supposed to be surprised that they can't feed their own populations?

This could have been a good article. It might even have been able to show what it says it shows. But first they have to get over their confirmation bias and learn to argue facts instead of ideology and emotion.

(Gee, I'm apparently in a much fouler mood than usual this morning. Perhaps more coffee will do the trick? Seems unlikely to me, somehow.)