4- Wednesday, February 13, 1985 - North Shore News

Feeding the hu ngry

he irony of British Coiambia being the pro-
vince that donated the most money to OX-.

FAM Canada’s Ethiopian relief fund while
at the same time people are being turned away
empty-handed at Vancouver’s food banks is all the
more striking when you consider that we live in a
world where some estimates suggest we could feed
40 times the present population merely using ex-

isting farm methods.

In the midst of the wave of
publicity that has generated
so much sympathy for starv-
ing Ethiopians (although not,
peculiarly, for down-and-out
fellow citizens), | have been
looking through the available

‘literature ‘on: the ‘subject of.
hunger, ranging from Susan .

George’s ‘powerful-and ‘eme-
tional book How The Other
Half Dies to the extremes of
pessimism and optimism
represented by Mesarovic
and Pestel’s Mankind At The
Turning Point. and Herman,
Kahn’s_ last effort,
Resourceful Earth, trying to
find the answer to the cruel
phenomenon of world
. hunger. | ‘
: According to Susan
George, it is all quite simple

and stark. The root causes of '

starvation in the world today,
and for the immediate future,
are politics and poverty, not

: the alleged inability: ‘of the -
world’s argicultural system tors

provide ‘enough food.

The:

“maintained.”

Certainly, in Ethiopia, all
the elements of political
madness are present. Anyone
who fails to see that the coun-
try’s Marxist leader,
Mengistu Haile Mariam, ‘has
brought the famine on

himself to -a great extent:

through a policy of Soviet-

style collectivization, which. .

has left the most productive
farmers living in fear that
their land would be
redistributed’ to other
peasants or to money-losing
farm cooperatives, leaving
them with no incentive to
make long-term investments,
has simply not been paying
attention.

- Asa result, as one ofiicial
put it, the country’s farmland:
has been ‘“‘mined rather than
Accordingly,
while drought has destroyed
marginal agricultural areas,

‘even: the traditionally fertile

regions ‘have failed to make
up the shortfall. Only a few

“short decades ago, Ethiopia

was not only self-sufficient in
food, but it managed to ex-
port crops to neighboring
countries.
Under
socialism,”"
farmers, along with pro-
western doctors, lawyers,
teachers and university
graduates, were executed bet-
ween 1978 and 1982. Some $2
billion in Soviet military aid
arrived in Addis Ababa, the
capital, but the new farm

‘scientific

“Only a few

decades ago,
Ethiopia was
not only self-
sufficient,

it managed to
export crops,’’

cooperatives received no
machinery, irrigation was
neglected, and modern
agricultural methods were
ignored.

That’s the politics ‘of it.

Then there’s’ the .issue of

whether help is really help, or
not, quite apart from reports
of food aid being sold on the

PACIFIC WEST RN

some 70,000"

black market, religious
organizations ripping off
donations and record dealers
overcharging for the smash
hit Do They Know It's
Christmas?

Whether famine relief
fund-raisers like to admit it
or not, the entire question of
aid as a useful long-range
tool has to be questioned. At
a recent conference of inter-
national aid workers in Ot-
tawa, foreign aid groups and
government agencies were
castigated by a British inter-
national development expert,
Jon Tinker, for encouraging
African countries. through
foreign aid to develop cash
crops like cotton for export
while allowing grain produc-
tion to fall dramatically.

OXFAM itself, in a report .

titled Aginst The Grain, ad-
mits that the bulk of food aid
programs actually inhibit the
progress of developing coun-
tries. University of B.C.
ecologist Tony Sinclair adds
that the natural balance of
the savannah, .in which
migratory herdsmen played a
vital role, came. unglued in
the 1950s when well-meaning
western agencies tried to im-

prove the herdsman’s lot by

drilling wells and newly-
independent African nations
sealed their borders and their
fate by bringing migratory
wanderings to a halt, thus
destroying the fragile eco-
system that depended ‘on
animal herds fefertilizing the
soil every year.

The truth of the matter
seems to be that since the Se-
cond World War, food pro-
duction has. actually. been

growing more rapidly than.

population, and even by con-
servative estimates there is no
reason {to suppose we
couldn't feed a world popula-
tion of seven billion people at
existing levels of nutrition.
The point is, people starve
because they can’t buy the
food that is available, not
because there isn’t enough
food. And that applies in

downtown Vancouver as
much as Ethiopia. The pro-
blem is food distribution, not
food production.

To point to a single factor,
like drought, as the cause of
mass starvation, is to entirely
overlook the. glaring reality
that it is really ideological
fanatics and bureaucratics

‘who are to blame...
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