In a fertile African land, swords batter plowshares

With famine knocking on Southern Africa's door, the world's aid organizations are already stretched to their limits. The last thing they need is famine in northern Uganda. And, in theory, this part of the continent should not be of any concern. Gulu district boasts of the second highest rainfall in the country, has arable land, and is inhabited by hard-working farming people.

But with the fighting between the government and the brutal rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) intensifying in recent months, the World Food Program (WFP) finds itself needing to provide people here with 100 percent of their food needs in order to keep them alive.

Herded into camps for the internally displaced – for their own protection, according to the government – unable to tend to their land and stuck with nothing to do and nothing to eat, the people here have been made helpless. "If they don't get out to their land and plant for the next harvest within the next three weeks," says WFP's Uganda country director Ken Davies, "they will be at as great a risk of starvation as anyone in Southern Africa."

Throughout Africa, conflict has become the biggest cause if hunger, say experts. When Mr. Davies joined WFP in 1989, 75 percent of the agency's resources were devoted to development work, such as school feeding programs, food-for-work projects, and reforestation efforts. Last year, he points out, almost 85 percent of WFP's assistance was in emergency relief and protracted post-conflict assistance.

"If peace were to break out around the world we would work ourselves out of business," says Davies. "The tragedy is that ever since the end of the cold war we have had a less stable world, more civil wars – and as such more suffering and hunger." Conflict and politics are the culprits behind the hunger now found in half a dozen African countries- including Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Zimbabwe.

Pabo is Gulu district's largest camp – with 43,000 people, whose actual homesteads may lie as close as two and a half miles away. The camp is a quiet place, with families sitting listlessly around their mud huts, and children, most with the yellow tint of hair which indicates malnutrition, staying close to parents.

There are a few attempts to grow some greens on the rough ground – with seeds left drying atop newly constructed mud graves – but most residents here simply rely on the WFP. Some 500,000 northern Ugandans are living in 33 scattered camps just like this one. Tens of thousands of others have crowded into Gulu town. Almost no village in the district is left inhabited.

The arrival of the 14-truck food convoy and its military escort is the biggest action of the month at Pabo. Children do cartwheels and yelp, grown men come out beating drums and women, holding last month's food sacks over their heads for protection from the blazing sun, line up to receive their share of corn, beans and cooking oil.

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