I. Modest Policy Proposals for East Africa

The specter of pessimism continues to haunt discussions of famine and hunger in sub-Saharan Africa. However, this pessimism is misplaced and misstated because famines and hunger everywhere in the world can be overcome by systematic public action.  The brilliant Amartya Sen, the Nobel Laureate for Economics in 1998, who has devoted his life to the study of famines, a few years back stated, �One of the problems that makes the task of the prevention of famines and hunger particularly difficult is the general sense of pessimism and defeatism that characterizes so much of the discussions of poverty and hunger in the modern world. While pictures of misery and starvation arouse sympathy and pity across the world, it is often taken for granted that nothing much can be done to remedy these desperate situations, at least in the short run.� (Tanco Memorial lecture, August 1990).

These subtle words apply to the recurrence of famine and perpetual hunger in Somalia now and soon in Ethiopia with unprecedented urgency. If you asked any Ethiopian legislator why famines occur with such consistency, he might look at you in surprise, and reply that it is a natural mishap manifest in crop failure, and the sluggishness and cursed existence of the victims. Of course, some of our ardent critical revolutionaries seek to advance what they call structural explanations. The latter explanation is the correct one.

Famine can be immediately curtailed if legislators make sure that peasant laborers, such as the Ethiopian nomads of the south, are not forced by desperation during periods of famine to consume their animals instead of preserving them for the creation of value, by seeing to it they are always helped by an efficient state to possess the necessary purchasing power to buy food where they are available, without eating their potentially value creating animals. It is the duty of the state to feed, clothe and house the victims of famine. Similarly, those fortunate producers who have the food grains that the famished need should be forced by public action not to engage in speculative withdrawals and panic hoarding, thereby contributing to the desperation of the hungry and endemically deprived.

During periods of famine and immediately after, primary producers of food should be encouraged to export grains if they are so able. The state must create the appropriate market for them so that they can slowly begin to get purchasing power and live productive lives again. If they can, they too are entitled to purchase luxury goods like the consumers of the city. They need not necessarily suffer from envy and jealousy, and harbor deep resentments of the city dweller. Envy and jealousy propel many ethnic conflicts. Systematic public action can remove this destructive state of mind. The peasant and the city dweller can work toward a common good.

As in Bengal in 1943, in which 3 million people died, a majority of which were fishermen, transport workers, agricultural laborers, in Ethiopia too, the victims are invariably poor peasants and pastoral nomads. Sen writes, �it is they who eat their animal products directly and also sell animals to buy food grains (thereby making a net gain in calories, on which he is habitually dependent. Similarly, a Bengali fisherman does consume some fish, though for his survival he is dependent on grain calories which he obtains at a favorable calories exchange rate by selling fish�a luxury food for most Bengali" ( Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines, p. 951).

The parallels between Ethiopia and Bengal are arresting. Both poor economies are pressured by desperation to make suicidal economic decisions. Both economies behave unproductively, in search of immediate purchasing power in order to exist. Had there been a functional state, it would have intervened and procured the right to eat without squandering crucial economic sources of value creation.

Matters become worse. Those who manage to survive famines reemerge on the streets of major cities as hungry and permanently poor. Consider the following image of a day in Addis, which I witnessed on Bole road in 1995. The scene has not changed to date in 2008!

I took a stroll at three o'clock in the afternoon to a flood of light that the tropical sun gave the city of Addis on a beautiful day in late summer. It was early in the afternoon when I was strolling on a familiar avenue through a deafening crowd. On this busy afternoon, thousands of exhausted people were returning from work; a vender was pushing his famished young chicken for hard sale; a prostitute was offering her lanky body for few birrs; a shoe shine boy was offering his services for coins; beggars were chanting, surrounded by a crowd; the street cafes were teeming with idlers sharing a pot of tea among ten people; children were pleading for money by aggressively putting their sickly hands inside wealthy people's big cars, and getting whisked away like flies; a preacher in the corner was telling the passersby that unless they mend their selfish ways, they are going to be consumed by a ferocious famine that might erase the inhabitants from the face of the earth; standing directly opposite from the preacher, a politician is campaigning and promising that he will bring prosperity and peace to every citizen. I smiled sadly, when I heard a small boy saying, �Sir, you are God, since you were chosen to be the wealthiest, so please give me money; it is God's money after all ".

I continued strolling down the avenue invaded by sadness. I saw a blind man carrying a deaf old woman, which turned out to be his mother. A passerby had just rudely thrown a coin at him, dry bread, with which he was feeding his mother, until another younger beggar snatched the bread, to unhappily discover that another one eyed beggar had just swiftly managed to take away from the previous unlawful owner. A small dog joined the scene longingly eyeing the bones, managed to snatch from a little boy, and run away with his catch, rejoicing his success.

A few yards away, a boy, small, nicely built, super black with shiny and semi oily skin was exposing himself annoying the passersby. He was dancing, by running left and right. Some women would secretly glance at him and whisper words to one another. Men would out rightly shout rude words at him, except that he did not care. He had apparently entered a trance. Young children giggled, jumped up and down, and innocently convinced that the boy was giving them a show, refusing their mothers desperate efforts to save them from cultural poisoning. The boy continued his act.

The harassed strollers and nervous walkers appeared neither shocked nor amused only annoyed. The large avenue was slowly populated by a variety of expensive cars. Behind their wheels sat brightly dressed and overgrown men. These were the wealthy residents of Addis on their way to lavish weddings and parties at the majestic Hilton. Far away into the end of the avenue, is the palace, which was built by Emperor Haile Selassie I.

The characters above are the victims of endemic deprivation. Some have migrated from the famished countryside. Some have been festering there for years. No one knows where he or she is born. Few care about when and how they die. Systematic public action is challenged to address their condition.

Consider the following syllogism to understand the Ethiopian condition at the perilous moment of famine. Some cynics will say there are too many people down there. Famine strikes, Ethiopians die in record numbers. No subtlety here! Too many people imply that they cannot all be fed, and when famine strikes, many will die because there are too many poor people. Moreover, too many people also mean that there are scarce goods and services for them, against the natural fact that there are finite goods in this world, since as Malthus taught us, scarcity and overpopulation are the enemies of humanity.

If famished people somehow survive, they inevitably become the underclass and thereby seriously disfranchised from society. They become the poor people that supposedly burden the planet because of their sheer numbers and the fact of scarcity of resources. There is no food for them, and this is a function of another menacing fact about them, which can be expressed in the following derivative syllogism. Now consider the following derivative syllogism: X has too many children. Having too many children is a sign of poor planning. X is disorganized and uncultured. Poor people such as X dug their own graves because they bred like flies and overpopulated our planet of finite goods and services. If poor people knew how to organize their lives, they would know precisely how to prepare themselves against the ravishes of famine by having fewer children, substantial savings and good work habits and functional values. Poverty by definition, the Malthusians think, is a function of moral disorganization. Poor people contribute to the misery of the world by their irresponsibility and inability of controlling their destinies.

Moral disorganization propelled by dysfunctional values is antithetical to war against poverty. In his time, Malthus protested against the existence of poor people and suggested their slow death, so that the world could plan intelligently by assuming scarcity as a feature of the human condition. None of these arguments are true. For years, however, humanity has been feasting on them as truths, which have insinuated themselves into our thinking lives as ideologies. It is outrageously propagated that poor people do not plan, are lascivious, suffer from the victimization syndrome, eat badly, and under nourish themselves and much else. I call this way of framing moral knowledge hegemonic ideologies, which I will explicate later.

Drought is one of the causes of famine, a point that I established earlier. Natural disasters of all kinds have afflicted humankind for millennia. The Torah introduces us most poignantly to the disastrous famine that afflicted a record number of desperate Egyptian bodies for seven years. The fat years of plenty and prosperity were replaced by the seven lean years of anguish, famish and desperation. In time, through the miraculous transcendental intervention, the lean years were displaced by the fat years. This was a classic locus of time and patience healing the wounds of an ancient African civilization.

The plagues of locusts are also another major source of famine. This natural phenomenon has been systematically contained by modern science in Europe and elsewhere in the materially civilized world; whereas Africa continues to be ravished by locust infestation to this very day. One of the devastating consequences of natural famines is population reduction. China in 1867-68 under the Tonghi Restoration was afflicted by famine, and the province of Shanxi was depopulated substantially. An Estimated mortality of 9.5-13 million people occurred.

African famines are also exasperated by natural facts peculiar to the continent, such as the fact that African soils are made up of sand and laterite, which erode easily and hold less water even where there is plenty of rain, than the clay and humus regions of vast portions of the world. The high iron and aluminum content makes the African soil systems hard to turn, therefore, less exposed to sun and air, which in turn results in cultivatable land. Thus African soil systems become devegetated and turn into dry land, which cannot absorb rain.

At the end of these tragic facts, drought appears as the final kiss of death, and famine is the expected result. As I have stated above, famine is caused by several factors. There are natural and artificial reasons. Drought is a natural cause. War, shortage of food, mismanaged resources and population growths are artificial causes. Several future articles will address the natural causes of famine extensively; before I move on to consider the role of politics, culture and behavior in the production of famine, as instances of the artificial causes of famine.

Leading experts in the world have identified drought and crop failure as the leading forces behind famine. The natural causes of famine are beyond our control. Science, however, can help us to mitigate the role of nature in making us helpless. We can for example improve the means of transportation by making it possible for a �rich harvest" in one site to supplement a poor harvest in another area. Of course no matter what we do, we cannot control the devastating power of hail, storm, frost and the like. We can however, do as the French did in Algiers to combat locust infestation. Effective water storage systems can also avert the impact of famine.

Local and regional famines in our time are directly caused by natural causes. The chief causes are the inability to regulate the patterns of rainfall, the ineffectiveness of systems of water storage, and the complications of enhancing the infertility of dry lands. These are some of the main natural causes of famine, which the West has already combated with improved scientific measures, whereas Africa continues to be plagued by them. Natural causes produced some of the major famines in the world. There was a great famine in Egypt and the great famine in Rome in 436 B.C. The great famine in India 1790-1792 killed so many people that they could not even be disposed off properly. In 1846-1847 famine in Ireland killed hundreds of thousands of people. The famine in Russia in 1891-1892 and the famine of 1887-1889 in China caused the death of millions of people. The countries mentioned herein are major countries or are from parts of the world which have experienced devastating famines throughout history.

In all these regions famines are directly caused by the forces of nature beyond human control, and yet major scientific efforts were made to prepare against the expected arrival of famines. India in particular did not successfully combat the natural causes, because it did not have functional democratic institutions guided by effective public policies well into the twentieth century. However, I must sadly conclude that the leading cause of famine in Ethiopia at the moment is the absence of a functional and compassionate state.

III. The Mental Scars of Famine

Long after Famine ravishes bodies, soils and landscapes, it leaves some unbearable mental scars that its victims have to share intergenerationaly with extraordinary patience and dignity. Consider the following image of famished bodies, while bearing the pain, and then living with its scars, and taking the memory all the way to the final days of their terrestrial existence.  A mother is seen struggling to feed a famished baby from the nerve center of her being. There is no milk to flow to the dried lips of a dying baby. The mother cries bitterly, and the baby cries even more. Mother and baby have no tears to shed. Their eyes are pregnant with unshakable tears. To her left is a five year old, chewing on his lips, squeezing life out of them. He struggles to open his eyes and see his baby sister on the brink of death.

The baby cries no more. The mother crawls with the dead baby on her hand. The five year old tries to follow but he cannot. He too cries, for he knew that his baby sister is no more.   The mother and the baby are gone. There is however, the mother and the five year old, who are fated to live that death every second of their lives. They are both fated to bear the unbearable mental scars of famine for years to come.

Note the salience of how the memory of famine survives in the bodies and souls of its survivors.  The living present of the  mother and her surviving boy�s lives is haunted by the memory of the helpless mother, who had nothing to feed, and the resultant death; remember too the five year old, who is a teenager now, who witnessed the death of his baby sister.  It is in this way, which the victims of famine, continue to remain, traumatized, haunted and scarred by the remembrance of the famished past.

What is more disturbing is the effect of famine on the national psyche, the psyche of the citizens, and their confidence and self-esteem. Once famine strikes, the living victims of the immediate past think and live as if famine will strike again. They refuse to forget, and even if they want to, they cannot forgive. Worse still, they cannot plan or forecast the future. For they think that nothing that they plan could bear fruit, since they think that famine will strike and take away their cattle, their land, their homes and their children.

Once burned, one will always burn. Once hurt, one will always be hurt is a vicious circle of despair in which the victims of famine enclose themselves. The victims wrap themselves with the blanket of the fear of nature, and that is precisely why a compassionate state must invest in both protecting its citizens, as its top priority, from the ravishes of nature by intelligent planning and building appropriate infrastructure; and also invest again on the victims of famine by healing their mental scars, so that they can be positive thinking, confident and productive producers of economies of value.

IV. Conclusion

The economically deprived subjects in Ethiopia, the victims of famines and hunger, are targets of public action- a blend of state action and market activities. In my article, The African Union, WIC July 23, 2000, I introduced two principles of justice, and proposed that legislators must be guided by principles of justice. The first principle sought to ensure that the hungry must be fully fed, clothed and sheltered as a mater of inalienable human right. Only after that condition is satisfied that irresponsible spending at Ethiopian hotels can be given a blind eye.

The members of the media must freely expose and criticize the discrepancy of poverty and wealth. Corruption, lavish spending abroad, endemic poverty at home, uneven purchasing power, the demystification of famines and hunger must be discussed in the public sphere, at parliament, in the classroom. The public must be informed and its conscience must be haunted.

Prostitutes and their parents must be given medical literacy about their violated bodies.  In this regard, Ethiopians can learn from the heroic successes of the poor state of Kerala, where Medical literacy has become a right and life expectancy has been generously extended to seventy years.

Those idle children I described above can be trained at very low cost to participate in the market to help themselves. Ethiopia can learn from South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, economies of value, which have successfully combined economic expansion with social responsibility to the disadvantaged poor, by reducing infant mortality and illiteracy. As Seen put the matter, " It is not legitimate to wonder whether a poor country can "afford" to spend so much on health and education that many poor countries (such as Sri Lanka, China, Costa Rica, the Indian State of Kerala, and others) have done precisely that with much success, but also understand the general fact that the cost of delivering public health care and basic education facilities is enormously cheaper in a poor country than in a rich one (Amartya Sen, Tanco Memorial lecture, p, 5)

Finally and most importantly, legislators must be advised to avoid costly wars that plunder value creating economies. Peace and prosperity for all must be the goal of the hopeful Ethiopia. Famines and hunger can be eliminated by the actions of a morally sensitive market and systematic public action. Diversification and peace must be the engines of change in a new Ethiopia.

Teodros Kiros (Ph.D)

May 30, 2008