Letters to the Editor
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Starving Season
What people don't understand about Africa is that one village can have food and a neighboring village can be experiencing famine. The villagers with food won't help their neighbors who are starving.
The starving villagers then have to depend on Americans and Europeans, and other wealthy countries, sending them food, which is hardly a geographically sensible solution.
And lest people think the village with food has barely enough to feed itself, this is often not the case. The local markets often teem with food, but they won't give it away to someone who is starving.
Also, humanitarian aid creates perverse incentives. If the rest of the world will come to the rescue, it gives the villagers with food yet another disencentive to help their neighbors; they know the West will help. However, we, in the West, can't very well refuse to help. So it is a Catch-22.
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Sorry to rain on your feel-bad parade
Mr / Ms. Headline-writer but hunger in Africa doesn't even make the Top 10 of important problems we are facing. When the tidal wave of peak oil and global warming and all the attendant crises wash over the world sometime later this century, famine in Africa is going to look like a rumbling stomach at a church service. There is no sustainable solution to Africa because we don't live in a sustainable world. The irony is, in the long run, Africa probably benefits from the long collapse of the world economy. Once its population stabilizes, Africa is going to be a lot better place to be than, say, Florida (under water) or most of China (a desert).
This is just another exercise in tired 1970s-era Save the World foolish rhetoric. GIVE some of the most notoriously corrupt governments in some of the most lawless countries in the world money? Please. The Pentagon doesn't spend $300 million on propaganda, but gives it to Africa, thereby making the propaganda unneccessary? I can't even summon the energy to roll my eyes at what a ridiculous leap in non-logic that is. This ludicrous sermonizing isn't going to give any Africans food. Billions of dollars have been poured down Africa's gullet for decades, and today there are MORE people with MORE problems. If there is a solution (which I highly doubt), it isn't going to come from interviewing bureaucrats who make a career out of African suffering and then stringing some nonsense together to be put up on the net.
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Colonization?
These are peaceful places, but that does mean that the local governments are competent. The writer says we need to teach or subsidize farming. But that takes a greater infrastructure that needs a government that can administer. Again the writer says we need more education for women so that a cycle can be broken, again that requires a competent government. We also need birth control until the situation is stabilized, it is hard to educate women if they are pregnant soon after reaching puberty. Again we need a competent government to make sure that the clinics are in place. The writer says we should give folks money so that local economies might be supported - Yes, we need a government in place to help that take place.
If we just dump food, at least we know that food is being supplied. And yes, it probably is slanted toward those companies that know how to lobby our congress. What else is new?
Colonization may be the only long term solution until the infrastructures are in place.
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Apathy of the West?
That's not quite true. In the last decades the West has poured billions and billions into Africa, however, as one poster noted, this amounted to nothing. And it won't amount to anything in the future either, no matter how much money people like Mr. Loewenberg suggest we pump into it.
The example of Asia: Of course they received some help and technological knowledge from the West, but mostly they helped themselves. It's a tad arrogant to assume that no country can become wealthy unless the West does it for them.
The wealth of many Asian countries today isn't the result of Western help programs (as much as they like to think so), it's the result of the hard work of the people in their respective countries.
Unless Africa gets its act together and stops the useless wars, corruption and narrow-minded this-tribe-vs.-that tribe attitude the situation won't change and there's nothing the West can do about it.
It always surprises me that so many people believe that the West can solve all problems, anywhere in the world, with just enough money. Sorry, that's not the case. The West isn't omnipotent.
Expanding the food aid program will have just one effect: Depenence. Local farmers will go out of business because they can't possibly compete with free food shipped over by the West. So they will need food aid as well. If the West sends cash instead, half of it will dissappear in the pockets of corrupt Westerners and Africans and the system of buying local food and distributing it will only work as long as the foreign money keeps flowing. Utter dependence, either way. Actually, this is what happens today already, so expanding it makes no sense at all.
Colonization: Interesting concept and it might work. Practically speaking many African countries still are colonies today. The exploitation by and dependance on the West have never stopped. However, Western corporations only reap the benefits (trade, resources) and leave the costly and difficult tasks (health care, education, infrastructure) to the local governments who too often do nothing at all about them because they rather engange in wars or corruption. So if Western countries were acutally in charge they would be forced to deal with these issues. However, they a) don't want that and b) colonization is not PC anymore today.
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Can you say condoms?
It seems like a better solution would be handing out condoms by the millions. This would have the effect of not only lessening the AIDS crisis, but also preventing unwanted pregnancies and more hungry mouths to feed. The only long-term solution to hunger and starvation is to get the population under control.