- $1 billion Empire State Building IPO: why it won't be like Facebook IPO
- In surprise move, GOP leaders admit defeat in payroll tax battle
- More than 30,000 Germans turn out against anti-piracy treaty ACTA
- Does Obama blueprint reduce budget deficit fast enough? (+video)
- Pentagon budget: Does it pit active-duty forces against retirees? (+video)
- Murdoch media crisis deepens with five new arrests
- How Pinterest combines the best parts of Facebook, Tumblr, and Etsy
- US, China face 'trust deficit' as China's heir apparent visits
The famine that wasn't
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
A few months ago, a text message made the rounds on the cellphones of aid workers in Southern Africa. "Starving child found in Malawi!" it exclaimed.
For workers assisting in what was supposed to be a widespread hunger crisis covering six countries, it was breaking news with a twist: a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the scarcity of victims.
Despite predictions that 11 million to 14 million people were facing potential starvation, few of the traditional signs of hunger had materialized. There were no hordes of migrants leaving their homes in search of food, no hospitals filling with malnourished children, no graveyards filling with the dead.
The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) says that famine was averted last year because the organization did its job well, intervening before the crisis mushroomed. Critics counter that the problem was never as large as the WFP and other agencies warned.
The real answer probably lies somewhere in between.
About a year ago, the WFP began warning that because of drought conditions, Southern Africa faced food shortages of crisis proportions. The World Health Organization said as many as 300,000 people could die if help didn't come soon, and the WFP asked for more than $500 million in aid. Donors opened their wallets, the WFP and their nongovernmental partners mobilized, and since June of last year, 650,000 metric tons of food was distributed to some 10 million people. It was the largest humanitarian response in the organization's history, though Iraq is expected to be bigger.
As Carol Bellamy, executive director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) put it, Southern Africa was grappling with a "lethal mix of drought-induced food shortages and HIV/AIDS" that required massive humanitarian intervention.
It was never a 'famine'
The WFP and aid agencies were careful not to label the situation in Southern Africa a famine, generally defined as the mortality rate in a region doubling with 20 percent of the children suffering from acute malnutrition.
"We're so used to in Africa seeing stick figures and corpses [during hunger crises]," says Judith Lewis, director of the WFP's regional operations in Southern Africa. "We didn't wait to see that before we started intervening here. That's why people didn't die, because we did our job right."
Guy Scott, a former minister of agriculture in Zambia and now an agricultural consultant, is one critic who isn't so sure WFP should get all the credit. In a recent study, he argues that the WFP exaggerated the number of people in need in Zambia by a factor of at least two. He doesn't claim that the exaggeration was intentional, but says the organization's assessment of the situation was based on flawed data and influenced by the government which had a political interest in seeing as much free food distributed as possible.
Page: 1 | 2 
