What is driving the explosion in food emergencies? Basically, there are four immediate triggers for large-scale food emergencies. Most recent crises have been fueled by a combination of these factors:
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Failing economic policies
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Political and ethnic violence
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AIDS and
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A sharp rise in natural disasters
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Failing economic policies --
the principal example here is the DPRK and, given the heightened political interest, we are submitting a more detailed statement to the committee on the situation there, especially with regard to WFP's repeated requests over 8 years to the Government to allow us to strengthen monitoring to meet our normal operational standards.
The severe contraction of the industrial base in North Korea after the fall of the Soviet Union, the lack of structural reform and cyclical drought and flooding have combined to create major food shortages and claimed enormous numbers of lives. Estimates of the loss of life from hunger range from several hundred thousand up to two million. We simply do not know for sure. This year the DPRK had relatively benign weather and was still 1 million metric tons short of needs. The country simply lacks the arable land and technology to be self-sufficient even under ideal conditions. The only way out is structural reforms that will revive the industrial sector where two-thirds of North Koreans work so the country can earn foreign exchange to import food commercially.
There is one bright spot. The nutrition survey by UNICEF, WFP and the Government of North Korea released last week showed some marked improvement in nutritional indicators for children, but they are still alarming by WHO standards and a breakdown in food deliveries could mean we lose the ground we have gained. Andrew Natsios is well known as an expert on North Korea and can give you more guidance on food issues there.
WFP is also working, under more promising conditions, in some of the ex-CIS states, such as Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, which are struggling with the transition from centrally planned to market economies. Our goal is to help maintain social safety nets as these countries go through the often painful transition process.
Failed economic policies have also contributed to a slowdown in southern Africa, with the most dramatic troubles now surfacing in Zimbabwe. I would like to go into a bit of detail about Zimbabwe because it is the greatest source of alarm in the region.
Ironically, Zimbabwe has been a traditionally strong food exporter. In the 1980s WFP purchased up to a half million tons of food a year there for use in operations in other parts of Africa. But politics, bureaucracy and bad economics have conspired to damage food output and, worse yet, slow down the aid response.
It is not our place to judge the merits of land redistribution in Zimbabwe or elsewhere. But the scheme now operating in Zimbabwe is damaging. Thousands of productive farms have been put out of commission and food output will be a mere 40 percent of normal levels this year. This scheme along with restrictions on private sector food marketing and a monopoly on food imports by the Government's Grain Marketing Board are turning a drought that might have been managed into a humanitarian nightmare. More than half of Zimbabwe's 12 million people are now living with the threat of starvation.
Nationwide shortages of basic commodities and fuel, high parallel market prices and runaway inflation are a formula for disaster. Levels of malnutrition are worsening and we are seeing hunger related diseases such as pellagra. Children have dropped out of schools and desperate families in rural Zimbabwe have resorted to eating both wild fruits and tubers -- some poisonous -- just to survive. Despite pressure from UN agencies, the Government has declined permission for us to conduct nutritional surveys that would help target what resources we have to the hardest hit areas.
There have been widespread accusations of food being withheld from opposition groups and news reports make it clear that food is seen as a weapon in domestic politics. Let me assure you that as far as the food aid we distribute with our NGO partners is concerned, we have a zero tolerance policy on political interference. We have suspended local distributions twice over the issue. But the simple fact is that we do not control all the food -- far from it. Our goal is to provide roughly a third of what is needed -- about 800,000 tons, while the Government and private traders are to provide the rest. Thus far, none of us is reaching the target.
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The second trigger for food crises is political and ethnic violence --
northern Uganda, Chechnya, Burundi, Cote d'Ivoire, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are some leading examples.
Violence and hunger go hand in hand now in West Africa. Liberia is now the epicenter of a conflict that engulfs the whole region and will impede economic recovery in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Significant new influxes of Liberian refugees have been recorded in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire and 135 000 people are displaced within Liberia itself. The ongoing civil unrest in Cote d'Ivoire has displaced 180 000 people and that figure may go higher. Further delay in resolving the underlying political problems there could lead to another major food crisis in Africa.
Some of these politically-driven crises have resolved themselves quickly, at least from a food aid perspective. The massive intervention WFP made in Kosovo was in response to ethnic violence. With the revival of agriculture in the region, we were able to shut down our feeding operation relatively quickly. We also intervened in East Timor and there too we have been able to move on. An end to violence is not, however, always a sign that we can phase out. In Angola our caseload has gone up by more than a half million as we have access to areas we could never reach before and we have begun to distribute food to help families return home and feed soldiers as they demobilize.
There are unfortunately some genuinely intractable conflicts like the civil war in the south of Sudan that wax and wane but never seem to go away. There are also a number of refugee feeding operations, such as those in the Western Sahara and Bhutanese refugees in Nepal, that have dragged on for more than a decade. The civil war in Colombia shows no signs of ending and the pervasive insecurity has brought some of the highest food delivery costs anywhere in the world.
In much of Africa and in Afghanistan we are struggling to cope with the legacy of war. Many airstrips in Angola, for example, are so heavily mined they are useless for food aid deliveries. Rural bridges and roads have not been maintained in years. Ports have deteriorated. Many demobilizing soldiers are bringing AIDS and other disease back to their native villages after prolonged separation from their families.
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AIDS --
We all know AIDS is a health disaster of epic proportions. There is far less appreciation of the fact that in many countries it has become a major cause of hunger both for its victims and their communities. As the disease affects people in their most productive years, the burden of producing food falls on the elderly and children. Since 1985, more than 7 million agricultural workers have died of AIDS in 25 African countries.
Peter Piot, who heads UNAIDS, has said that in many poor communities he has visited the very first thing AIDS victims ask for is not medicine, not money - it is food for their families, food for their hungry children. For those AIDS victims lucky enough to receive medical treatment, nutrition is critical. For the HIV positive, good nutrition is crucial in helping them ward off opportunistic infections and stay productive as long as possible. Unfortunately, donors have not yet recognized that fact fully and WFP certainly is struggling to get resources for the operations we have begun for AIDS victims, their families and orphans. We are working with the Secretary General and the most affected countries on this issue and on getting access to the Global AIDS Fund for more nutrition interventions. We would certainly welcome active support from the United States.
In my entire life I do not believe I have ever seen anything as disturbing as the impact that AIDS is now having in southern Africa. In modern times, we have never before seen a disease with the capacity to cause large scale social breakdown, to simply destroy societies. HIV infection is aggravating the famine in southern Africa and literally decimating the rural labor force. Four out of 5 African farmers are women, and women now have higher infection rates -- among young people, women account for nearly two out of three new cases.
The number of AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa is staggering -- over 11 million and rising. In some of the villages I visited as the Secretary General's Special Envoy for the crisis in southern Africa, fields lay unattended with no one to work them. There are many thousands of families without parents -- one in ten in Malawi. Worse yet, what we see today is only the tip of the iceberg as death rates will not peak until 2007-2009.
The longer-term impact of AIDS will have a staggering effect on everything from food security to overall political and social stability. The ranks of government workers are decimated. A UN colleague relates how a ten-person delegation from the European Union was met by the Minister of Agriculture of one African country. Strangely, the Minister arrived at the meeting alone bluntly explaining that all his senior staff was either ill or had already died from AIDS. The President of Zambia told me his country was losing 2 000 teachers a year, while only training 1000 replacements. You could see in the faces of many government officials a horrible resignation, a sense of impending collapse.
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And finally -- and this is really the largest threat we face -- there is the weather.
Yes, the weather. The scale of WFP's activities has tracked closely with the occurrence of natural disasters brought on by abnormal weather phenomena. And we are seeing those phenomena on a scale no one has ever imagined. In the last few years, we delivered emergency food aid in response to the largest floods in China in a century and to drought victims in over a dozen countries stretching from southern Sudan to Pakistan. The past two years have brought the highest number of weather-related disasters over the decade.
One-sixth of the main harvest in Ethiopia has been lost to drought, six million people are already in need and that figure could more than double after the first of the year. WFP has appealed for 80 million dollars worth of food aid for the first quarter of 2003, about half the total needed. The worst-case scenario will require two million tons of food aid at a cost of 700 million dollars. Ethiopia has suffered from cyclical droughts for years and has not managed to build up a capacity to withstand them. As is the case in much of Africa, state control of agriculture has failed to provide the food output needed with high population growth rates and Ethiopia -- a net food exporter in the 1960s -- is now chronically dependent on food aid.
Nearly 60 percent of the population of Eritrea - more than 2 million people -- have also been hit hard by drought and will need food aid this year. The effects of recent war with Ethiopia remain -- thousands of soldiers are yet to demobilize and 1 million people in major grain producing areas were dislocated.
There have been comparisons in the media of the situation today with the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 and the large drought that struck southern Africa in 1992. There are critical differences -- some positive, some negative. First, early warning systems have functioned well -- the affected governments and donors have known for months of the impending food crises. In Ethiopia and Eritrea, we expect to profit from the end of hostilities between those countries. Both faced drought just two years ago when relief operations were held up by fighting and the fact that war was draining a million dollars a day from their national treasuries. While the scale of the drought in the Horn of Africa may eventually eclipse what we are confronting further south, the political climate and the level of organization for coping with such emergencies, especially in Ethiopia, will make the relief effort far more effective.
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