Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Il NYT sulla fame in Niger

The New York Times - July 31, 2005
A New Face of Hunger, Without the Old Excuses
By LYDIA POLGREEN
THE pictures are wrenching. A nomad holds an infant aloft, its gaunt head
lolling dangerously, its matchstick limbs akimbo. A father asks God to
forgive him for weeping publicly; he has just buried his son. A child in an
emergency clinic awakens from a hunger-induced stupor only to moan and weep
from the pain of his starvation-induced skin sores.
These images of victims of a food crisis in the vast, landlocked West
African nation of Niger, captured by a BBC television correspondent and
shown around the world, look like something the world has seen before - the
famine in Ethiopia in the 1980's. That catastrophe prompted an extraordinary
outpouring of generosity, along with a vow that the world would never again
stand by as millions went hungry.
Yet here it is again, far smaller in scale, yet replete with images of
stick-thin children with hunger-swollen bellies clinging to bony,
flat-breasted mothers. Once again there is the question: what causes these
calamities that invariably afflict the world's poorest corners?
The immediate cause is certainly known. Locust swarms and poor rains last
year wiped out much of the nation's harvest and caused grain prices to
triple. But when misfortunes strike other countries, they can help their
people, with planning, with resources and by seeking aid from abroad. So
what has gone so terribly wrong in Niger?
For decades famine was seen largely as a consequence of bad political
leadership. Food scarcity in Ethiopia in the 1980's had natural causes, but
its transformation into a deadly famine came to be understood as mostly
man-made, the result of a Stalinist regime's collectivist ideology and its
pursuit of victory over insurgents without regard to the well-being of its
people. It seemed a neat illustration of the development the economist
Amartya Sen's dictum: "No famine has ever taken place in the history of the
world in a functioning democracy."
But that does not explain Niger's problem. Niger is a democracy. It has been
one since 1999, when it made the transition to multiparty democracy and
constitutional rule after a decade of turmoil. It has also made, in part at
least, the painful transition from a centralized, state-run economy to a
market-driven one, earning praise and ultimately relief from about half of
its estimated $1.6 billion in foreign debt from the World Bank.
Yet Niger still earns a horrifically high score on the index of human misery
compiled by the United Nations Development Program, which lists it as the
second least developed nation in the world, just ahead of Sierra Leone.
More than 25 percent of its children die before their fifth birthdays. Those
who survive go on to scrape a meager existence from a harsh, arid savanna
that is just barely suitable for farming and cattle grazing, yet must feed
12 million people. Cyclical droughts and chronic hunger are a way of life.
Life expectancy tops out at 46 years.
Nor is Niger alone in its troubles. Of the 25 countries at the bottom of the
development list, all but two are in Africa. Niger's food crisis - it is
not, despite news reports, a famine yet - is not even the worst on the
continent. Similar problems, involving even larger numbers, exist in
Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Darfur and elsewhere.
Far from ignoring or playing down its troubles, Niger's government, in
cooperation with international aid agencies, sounded the alarm back in
November. It provided subsidized grain and other aid from its own stocks,
and has apparently made every effort to avert disaster. The world simply
failed to respond, leaving the government unable to mount a sufficient aid
campaign.
"The world has not noticed," said Mark Malloch Brown, chief of staff to the
Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general. "When you get a crisis of
this kind in a little known, landlocked country, which is Francophone and
hard to reach, the inability to mobilize and galvanize sufficient support in
a timely way is huge."
Of $16 million requested by the United Nations in an appeal for aid, less
than a third had been received until about a week ago, when images of
starving children began appearing on television. Food distribution is well
under way, but precious time was lost, Mr. Malloch Brown said.
Niger and its neighbors are textbook cases of what the Columbia University
economist Jeffrey D. Sachs calls "the poverty trap."
"When poverty is extreme," Mr. Sachs wrote in his recent book, "The End of
Poverty," "the poor do not have the ability - by themselves - to get out of
the mess."
The new prescription he advocates for such countries, as he described it in
a telephone interview, is a large infusion of aid directed to basic needs
like growing more food, providing access to clean drinking water and
preventing diseases like malaria.
If farmers in Niger got better seeds and fertilizers, he said, they would
grow more crops, preventing food shortages in the first place. Children who
had safe drinking water would not suffer from diarrhea or its deadly
complications, malnourishment and dehydration. Fighting malaria, which
debilitates as well as kills, would increase productivity. Good roads would
allow rural populations to send produce to market in flush times and let
their government and aid agencies know who is in trouble in bad times.
Niger may be a democracy, but its government is weak and its tiny budget is
almost entirely dependent on foreign aid. It may have a free press, but if
literacy is at 17 percent and few can afford radios or televisions, how can
a free press safeguard against famine? It may have elections, but if the
government has put itself at the mercy of international donors in return for
promises of aid, can it be held to account when the world does not live up
to its end of the bargain?
In the end, the way out of misery for countries like Niger is neither
democracy nor increased aid alone, but a blend of the two, said Stephen
Devereux, an expert on famine at the University of Sussex in Britain. Mr.
Sen's phrase about famine and poverty is often misquoted to leave out the
word "functioning." Helping young democracies become functioning nations is
probably the only way to inoculate countries like Niger against catastrophe.
"Niger appears to have done everything it could," Mr. Devereux said. "We
have to ask ourselves, what do international donors owe Niger in return? If
you accept the situation that a country is so poor that it will be dependent
on assistance for a long time, the responsibility for preventing famine is
shared."

 By LYDIA POLGREEN
#_Non e`per caso che ad Arezzo si programmi un'altra colazione-pranzo-cena
anche stavolta!? :-/
Giano