Cover
story
AFRICA fears wave of starvation
By ARTHUR JONES
Africa is once again facing famine.
By January or February, the world could again be looking at
“stick-limbed children and women dying at the side of the road, images not
seen since the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85,” said Catholic Relief Services
executive director Ken Hackett.
Just back from Southern Africa where Zambia, Zimbabwe and
Malawi’s food-short populations are already severely weakened by the
HIV-AIDS pandemic, Hackett said Ethiopia and Eritrea also face a rerun of the
early 1980s.
The two immediate problems, said the Catholic Relief Services
official who was part of a U.S. Catholic delegation that returned Nov. 4, are
that “the world doesn’t know about this yet, the word isn’t out,
and that the U.S. administration’s attention is elsewhere.”
Involvement by the United States is key, as America provides about one-third of
all food crisis assistance through the World Food Program.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, often called USAID,
reports it has already delivered or pledged more than $275 million in food aid
to six countries in Southern Africa since the beginning of this year.
It isn’t just Southern Africa going hungry. Serious food
shortages are developing in two other world hunger spots: in Afghanistan, and
across “a swath” of coffee-growing Central America (see accompanying
story).
Almost half of the 30 million people at risk in Southern Africa
are in Zimbabwe, where political and economic instability under President
Robert Mugabe have worsened a deteriorating situation. Mugabe has forced white
farmers off their lands. This disruption, along with the drought and economic
mismanagement, signals a potential major hunger disaster scenario.
Hackett was in Africa with a fact-finding delegation that included
Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., Bishop Robert Lynch, Catholic Relief Services
chair; Pensacola-Tallahassee, Fla., Bishop John Ricard, Catholic Relief
Services’ former chair and the new chair of the U.S. bishops’
International Policy Committee; and conference staffers Jerry Powers and
Franciscan Fr. Mike Terry.
Crucial and damaging though the famine threat is, the
delegation’s interests were not limited to hunger worries. Debt relief,
African nations’ structural needs, and bolstering the voice and activities
of African Catholic bishops’ conferences were equally on the agenda. There
are 116 million Catholics on the continent of 802 million people.
Powers said the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, commonly
called the USCCB, under recent International Policy Committee chair Boston
Cardinal Bernard Law, made Africa a strong focus in recent years. In 2001, the
conference’s Social Development and World Peace secretariat issued “A
Call to Solidarity with Africa.” In March of this year, the statement
was followed by a discussion group guideline: “Answering the Call to
Solidarity in Africa.” Quite simply, the follow-up is simultaneously a
plea to and an outline of why U.S. Catholics and parishes should become
involved in Africa and African church issues.
The U.S. bishops’ own solidarity with Africa comes at a time
when key Catholic churches on the continent are beginning to find their public
voice. For example, the delegation met with South Africa’s Catholic
bishops who, Hackett explained, lead a church that “is important now, and
even more important to Africa’s future. It is a church that has gone
through apartheid and through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission era. It
has a lot to give in terms of church leadership throughout the
continent.”
Hackett, an “Africa hand” since the 1960s, said the
Catholic voice in Africa is growing, and there is evidence of a new
cohesiveness among the episcopal conferences.
“The church in Africa is coming together in positive ways.
The bishops in Central Africa -- Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Uganda -- are sitting
down together even when their nations may be batting heads. We’re seeing a
new solidarity,” he said. The Southern African bishops went to civil-war
fraught Sudan to stand with the church there.
“We’re happy to see that,” explained Hackett,
“because we’re putting money into building the justice and peace
capacities of the various bishops’ conferences.” And he explained the
link between the trust that American Catholic agencies and the U.S. bishops are
building up, and the expectation that U.S. Catholics will help.
Catholic Relief Services has people in these African countries, he
said. “They sit down with the bishops’ conferences over a period of
time. They ask, ‘How can we be of assistance?’ ‘Have you thought
about this?’ ‘Perhaps we can fund a visit to that place for
you.’ And we keep pushing an agenda that finds ways to be supportive from
the base community level up to the national and regional level.”
The U.S. church operates so effectively in Africa, he said,
because the trust level is so high.
Consequently, when famine looms, as it now does, he said,
there’s an expectation that Catholics will be in the front line of
assistance. For example, Catholic Relief Services/Malawi has been organizing
emergency food response distributions since May. That general distribution --
in a drought-ruined country where agriculture represents 45 percent of the
gross domestic product and 90 percent of exports -- was expanded in September
and will keep growing, supplies permitting, as the crisis deepens.
What’s needed from Americans in general and U.S. Catholics in
particular, said Hackett, “is pressure on the U.S. government to keep
starvation in Africa clearly in its focus at a time when we have war hanging
over our heads here along with financial crisis issues.”
Arthur Jones is NCR editor at large. His e-mail address is
arthurjones@attbi.com
Related Web sites
“A Call to Solidarity with
Africa”
www.usccb.org/sdwp/international/stpag.htm
Catholic
Relief Services
www.catholicrelief.org
U.S. Agency for
International Development
www.usaid.gov
World Food
Program
www.wfp.org
National Catholic Reporter, November 22,
2002
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