Editorial: War and Famine in Africa

1 Editorial: War and Famine in Africa This number of ROAPE is devoted to the twin issues of war and famine in Africa — more specifically to famine and how war, among a number of factors, impinges on it. While the attention of the northern hemisphere has been focused on the increasing threat of nuclear annihilation, the population of much of Africa has been concerned with staving off famine. Compared with the immediate horrors of starving to death, the threat of nuclear destruction seems remote and more a matter for the superpowers. In fact, the issue of increasing nuclear militarism in the 'north' is highly relevant to the future food security of the world. There is little doubt that the southern hemisphere would suffer greatly from the 'nuclear winter' produced by nuclear war in the 'north' — with the reduction in heat and light received from the sun having disastrous consequences for food production and thus producing worldwide famine. But, as Shindo points out in this issue, itis also relevant to the present food security of those countries, mainly African, now experiencing drought and famine. This is because the militarisation of the 'north' permeates all aspects of its advanced industry so that military production and technology are intimately linked to its industrial production processes. Transnational investment in the 'south' will thus inevitably introduce the militarised dimension into patterns of industrial development in the southern hemisphere, forcing it to become increasingly dominated by the need for ever more sophisticated military hardware. This is already glaringly obvious in areas such as the Middle East, but military spending in the developing countries in general is taking up an increasing proportion of state budgets. And it is hardly a coincidence that this should be happening precisely when the world's poor are finding it increasingly difficult to avoid starving to death. Military spending and military rule in much of Africa diverts resources away from the improvement of agricultural productivity. It also diverts resources away from food imports when they become necessary to feed drought-stricken peasantries. Of course, it is not at all clear that if African governments suddenly reduced military spending and diverted resources to agricultural investment there would progress in increasing food output and avoiding famine. Numerous other questions concerning strategy choices, questions of distribution, theirole of the state, class struggle and so on, remain to be overcome. The pages of ROAPE have been full of accounts of the failures of agricultural investment schemes and of state interventions in agriculture generally. Time and again, it would appear that the principle objective of the state, however characterised, is to appropriate surplus from and ensure political control over the peasantry. Whether the state 2 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY concerned calls itself socialist or not does not really seem to make much difference. And the results are there to see. The FAO estimates that over the last decade and a half cereals production in Africa has fallen by 15 per cent per head. Net imports of cereals are consuming over 20 per cent of export revenue in some cases. And export revenue is not growing because production of export cash crops has declined — in some cases by over 50 per cent. There are now 18 African countries with food shortages and over 100 million people are threatened with famine. Further, there is no general pattern which shows that 'socialist' states have performed any worse or any better than 'capitalist' ones — save where they have been subjected to civil war or imperialist aggression and economic sabotage. What general pattern can be seen shows that the peasantry is seen as an easy source of government revenue while investment in agriculture (as a proportion of total investment) is exceptionally low given the importance of the sector to national product and tax revenues. But economic failures in other sectors of the economy have also played their part in agricultural disaster. The decline of the rural — urban terms of trade (itself so often a euphemism for the exploitation of the peasantry) and the failure to supply sufficient manufactures and agricultural inputs to the rural areas are but two factors which have acted as disincentives to farmers to increase production for enlarged markets. Such factors are, in turn, the result of inadequacies in industrial development strategies designed around large quantities of imported inputs. In many African countries the level of industrial production is lower now than it was at the beginning of the 1970s. In the same countries, the burden of debt repayment takes up increasing amounts of foreign exchange which is not being earned by stagnant industries and agricultures. All this reduces the possibilities of offsetting immediate problems caused by drought through food imports — even where these problems are anticipated. If drought is the result of a mixture of human and natural causes, famine is the result of a variety of a number of human, social factors — not least among them being the inability of an economy to buy in emergency food surpluses through the normal channels of international trade. This ensures that people will die of hunger before some ad hoc international relief effort is mounted — often in the most incoherent and arbitrary way, as the Briefing by Wallace would indicate. Ultimately, though, problems of drought, famine and low agricultural productivity need long-term policy solutions, not short-term palliatives. Wallace finds distressingly little attention being paid to the longer term in the work of relief agencies. Whether or not such strategies will be pursued within particular African countries depends on the degree to which the interests of the peasantry — and of the poor in general — are represented in the constellation of political and class forces which make up the state. It is clear that while in some countries richer sections of the peasantry and the capitalist farmers prosper as a result of their exercise of political power, the mass of the peasantry suffer the oppression of state power. The state attempts to incorporate the peasantry into a structure of production and marketing which serves its accumulation interests. However the accumulation which takes place is directed either to the productive interests of capitalist farming, as O'Brien shows here for Sudan, and Schoepf for Zaire, or to the consumption interests of state functionaries, or to both. The success of long-term policy solutions which back the peasantry and build upon its local knowledge and creativity, will depend too on the degree to which the peasants are able to retain control over their lives in any reorganisation of agricultural EDITORIAL 3 production systems. So far the record of organising peasants from above into different types of producer associations has been far from successful. Where there have been successful instances of grass roots organised peasant producer associations of co-operatives or collectives, these have been perceived by the institutions of the state as a threat to their power and control over peasants' lives. Incorporation and decline are usually the result. Peasants can, of course, retreat into subsistence or they can sell their labour power to the capitalist farming or industrial sectors on a permanent basis or some combination of the two. When faced with drought, however, the subsistence peasantry are at the mercy of the state. It is the state which holds food supplies, controls the means by which these can be distributed (usually through the military) and exercises control over the peasantry by virtue of this food power. It is the state moreover which is best placed to know the full extent of a drought and therefore the likelihood of food shortages. The Ethiopian case is a very clear illustration, as Hailu Lemma shows, of the failure of the government to respond early enough by organising food supplies to the areas stricken by drought. Both political and economic reasons can be adduced for this failure. The Mengistu regime's celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Revolution clearly took pride of place. That there was famine 10 years into the construction of Ethiopian 'socialism' was unlikely to aid the celebration atmosphere. And what also would have had to be admitted was the failure of the Ethiopian government to send relief aid into the drought areas of Eritrea and Tigre because they were not under government control. From an economic point of view, pressure on scarce foreign exchange made it less possible to acquire food on international markets. The expansion of military expenditure in Ethiopia has also competed for import finance and this is inextricably linked to the pursuit of a military solution to the nationalities question. Elsewhere in Africa, especially in the south, militarisation is a consequence of the attempts by the South African regime to destabilise the independent states to the north. These are themselves racked by crises of agricultural production linked to both drought and war. It is not possible to sustain production in areas persistently bombed or subjected to take-over by government and rebel troops, nor is it possible to send food aid into stricken areas when supply lines are blocked by saboteurs' activities. Whether faced with South African backed insurgents, ultimately operating as proxies for the United States, as in Angola and Mozambique, or by national liberation movements, as in Tigre and Eritrea, or by movements seeking the overthrow of tyranny, as in Sudan (see Scott's Briefing), governments are inexorably pushed into increases in their military budgets. Nor have regimes based on the interests of small cliques of bureaucratic and bourgeois strata been immune from military spending. Precise data are very difficult to obtain, but what data there is shows that defence budgets are way in excess of those for agricultural investment.

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