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INSIDE AFRICA
World Food Program Initiative; Oxfam President Interrview
Aired August 16, 2008 - 12:30:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JIM CLANCY, INSIDE AFRICA: Hello and welcome to INSIDE AFRICA, your weekly window on the continent. I'm Jim Clancy in for Isha Sesay.
In our report this week, the World Food Program presses an emergency initiative for 16 hunger hot spots, including Ethiopia. 24 years after images like this showed hunger-stricken Ethiopians and it shocked the world. We look at this country today and see it facing another famine, and ask why is history repeating itself? And we're going to talk to the photographer who shares his images of the suffering. And we'll talk with the president of Oxfam America, who is telling the U.S. and the world what is going so terribly wrong in our efforts to help.
All right, let's begin. 16 crisis zones, $214 million. This is the World Food Program's urgent action plan. WFP says more than half of that money, $110 million, will target two countries in the most dire need -- Ethiopia and Somalia. Part of that amount will come from the WFP's emergency reserve funds, and the remaining $104 million -- that's going to go to 14 countries, mostly in Africa, where food crisis and public anger are running high.
These funds will be used to help pregnant women, undernourished children, and people living in urban areas who cannot grow their own food.
The U.N. reports food prices have tripled in Ethiopia, and drought has crippled this year's crops. Ten million Ethiopians, one in every eight, need emergency food aid. The lack of rain wiped out food stocks for many. And while the fields may be green today, journalist Martin Geissler reports on the heartbreaking reality -- hunger is again stalking the children of Ethiopia.
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MARTIN GEISSLER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: This is the human face of the world food crisis. In a village in southern Ethiopia, mothers queue with their malnourished children for emergency rations of food. They can't afford to feed their babies, and now it seems neither can the outside world.
The distended stomachs, a symptom of the hunger so many here are suffering after two poor harvests in a row, and there are more new cases every day.
(on camera): So now, he is very severely malnourished.
(voice over): This is Zina (ph). At 5 years old, she weighs just 10.5 kilograms. Hunger has damaged her immune system, leaving her weak and ill. Her biceps, just a pitiful 3.5 inches round.
Her mother told me she begs for food for her children, but she fears Zina doesn't have long to live.
Taladech (ph) brings up a family of 10 in this one-room hut. They were given a food ration almost a month ago, but that ran out after 10 days. Now they survive by eating false banana, a root which grows in the bush here.
This is what they mean by a green famine -- the crops are growing, but only another two months of steady rain will bring a harvest, and that's perhaps the cruelest irony in all of this. The children here are starving surrounded by food.
The government's grain reserves run out long ago. And now the U.N. supply is thinning too. These people get a monthly handout. July's was cut by a third. The rising price of grain worldwide means an extra 100 million pounds needs to be raised just to keep this up.
(on camera): How tough is that ration cut for people who need it most? Are they getting what they need?
BARRIE GAME, WORLD FOOD PRGRAMME: Probably not. I mean, once again, it's this kind of finger in the dike, you know, doing, doing what we can to get these people a helping hand through this really difficult period for them.
GEISSLER (voice over): 400 miles north, near the Somali border, we found a changed landscape, but the same crisis. The rains are late here, too, and it's thought half the population in this region needs food aid. They're pastoralists. Their livestock is their livelihood. They graze them wherever they can. But in this barren landscape, their animals are dying and so is their hope.
Half this woman's goats have starved. Her children have gone off in search of food, leaving her eight-year old granddaughter to look after.
The government is telling these nomadic people to change a culture they've followed since time began. In small pockets, they've started helping them to farm. Aid is slow to reach this region, and these days so is the rain. They've been given a stark warning.
OMAR ABDI, REGIONAL GOVERNMENT: I have two options for them now-- to die or just to do the land.
GEISSLER: But across this country just now, outside help is keeping millions alive. Malnutrition figures continue to rise and show no sign of slowing. This global crisis may be raising food bills in the West, but the people here are paying a far, far higher price.
Martin Geissler, ITV News, Ethiopia.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CLANCY: Internationally acclaimed photographer Nick Danziger recently went to Ethiopia to document the food crisis there. Up next, he'll show us what he found and explain what he hopes to accomplish with these photographs.
Also ahead, because it's obviously not working, the president of Oxfam America urgently calls on the U.S. and other governments to change the way they deliver food aid.
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CLANCY: Hello, everyone. And welcome back to INSIDE AFRICA.
Ethiopia's current food crisis evokes painful memories of dual famines that hit simultaneously in 1984. Back then, drought and conflict. combined upon, formed a perfect storm that left more than a million people dead.
Drought is a key component of the current crisis, too, but this time, soaring global food prices are also a part of the equation.
The youngest of the hungry are the most vulnerable. The U.N. estimates more than 75,000 Ethiopian children under the age of 5 are suffering from severe, acute malnutrition.
Now, award-winning photojournalist Nick Danziger recently traveled to the region with the international aid group Oxfam. Danziger documented scene after scene of desperation along the Ethiopian border with Somalia, Djibouti and Eritrea. And he was kind enough to share his photographs and personal insights with us.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
NICK DANZIGER, PHOTOJOURNALIST: I knew that there was a very difficult situation because of the drought. It hasn't rained in many of the areas that I had traveled to for two years, and in addition to that I had heard that they were losing a lot of their livestock.
What I didn't realize was the severity of the effects not only of the drought and the loss of livestock, but the incredible increases in prices for food. Many of the people I met, which are simply unable to purchase food because prices have doubled, tripled and in some cases are five times what they were a year ago.
It's very difficult to be sitting literally two or three feet away from women who are starving to death. Unda (ph), this woman who literally had a matter of a day or two to live, no more, and then literally because she was fed some baby food was able to sit up. And I was told by the nurse who was traveling with me in that particular region that, you know, she was able for the equivalent of $1 to give enough nourishment for two days to save that woman's life. But what's going to happen in two more days, difficult to say.
Or indeed, the photograph of Fatima (ph) holding her two-year old son Toro (ph), who is unable to stand anymore. I rarely saw a child play anymore. So it's those human stories of people telling me about the happier days, when their children were bright and cheerful, were speaking, laughing and playing. That's no longer the case.
I've visited many countries in the world where I've seen malnourished children, but every single village that I went to, there were borderline cases, and the majority, I would say, of malnourished children or severely malnourished children.
I was seeing grownups and children eating animal feed. I mean, they were trying to soften that feed up with a little water that they have, soaking the animal feed, and then eating it. That`s what people have been reduced to.
And to be honest with you, I mean, in this day and age, to see people and witness people dying because there is no food and water is just unacceptable.
They have nothing to survive on. Many of those images of people who`ve already left their homes in search of food and water and have found nothing.
Most of the men have left with the livestock to try and save what they have. I mean, they have actually left their women, children and the elderly behind, because it`s impossible for them to travel their pack animals who have already died, a lot of the camels and donkeys, in other words, that would have carried the elderly and the young and their homes. And these men are crossing into Somalia. They`re fleeing Ethiopia towards Somalia. They`re fleeing towards Djibouti, to try and find pasture so that their animals will survive. But they've actually left their next of kin at home with absolutely nothing.
There is no medical attention in many of these areas. There's occasionally a health post with an untrained medic, and that's all that's left behind.
They feel forgotten, but it has to be said, they are very resigned. They do say it's in the hands of God now, and unfortunately, that's what I repeatedly heard over and over again, because I think for many, they just don't believe any help is now going to come to them.
What astonished me was how connected they are with our world. They listen to the radio, and they have a great sense of what is going on elsewhere in the world. And I think, you know, for me, it's the sense that we are all connected, so why are these people being left in these conditions?
I think there's still hope. Yes, people are already losing their lives, but it's not too late. I really believe that if people were able to donate to NGOs, to aid agencies working in the field, if governments in particular were to mobilize now tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CLANCY: Danziger tells us that he hopes those photographs you just saw will help motivate people to pressure their governments to stand up and do something about this crisis.
So, what exactly should those governments do to help? Up next, an expert on food aid explains why the current system just isn't working, and what we need to do to change it.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Making business news in Africa this week. The Southern African Development Community is formally launching its free trade area. All but two member states have adopted the plan, which has been in the works since 1996. Under the FTA, more than 80 percent of trade between SADC members could be free of tariffs, with the goal of removing all trade barriers by 2012.
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga is calling the energy situation in his country a, quote, "national crisis." At a meeting of the Petroleum Institute of East Africa, Odinga called for more private investment. Kenya gets just 12 percent of its energy supply from the private sector.
The world's largest social networking web site is rapidly expanding its reach in Africa and the Middle East. The number of Facebook visitors from the region is increasing at an annual rate of 403 percent. That's according to the online statistics company, Comscore (ph). Facebook is growing at an even faster rate in the Asia Pacific region and Latin America.
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CLANCY: Welcome back, everyone. You're with INSIDE AFRICA.
The severe food crisis affecting Ethiopia has many people around the world asking how could this be happening again. We put that question to the president of Oxfam America, Raymond Offenheiser.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RAYMOND OFFENHEISER, OXFAM AMERICA PRESIDENT: I think the important thing for us to understand about Africa is that we as donors and contributors to Africa have made a major investment charitably in trying to feed affected populations when they are affected by major emergencies, but we haven't really invested strategically in helping African nations build the agricultural sector over the last 30 years.
CLANCY: That's what I want to get at, because I mean, people are doubling their food budgets. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured into these countries, but admittedly, it's short term aid and some say that's just not ever going to solve the problem.
OFFENHEISER: Well, exactly. We're investing in short term to deal with an immediate crisis, but we're not investing in the long term solutions. We're not creating lasting solutions to this poverty and hunger problem.
CLANCY: Any time we look at this, we look at technology and we see where the advances have been made. A lot of people talking these days about micro dosage, micro dosing fertilizer, small cap fulls (ph) of fertilizer being added to the seed at the time of planting, reduces fertilizer costs, doubles the yield, according to some of the studies that have been done. But where is the infrastructure to support those kinds of technologies that really would work?
OFFENHEISER: We really need to be careful not to assume that technology is the magic bullet and the solution. In many countries, they were actually better off 30 years ago than they are today in terms of their ability to actually provide agricultural extension to their farmers, provide agrarian credit to their farmers, have infrastructure that would get crops out of the field and into the marketplace, and there needs to be an enormous investment in building that capacity, combined with the delivery of some of these new technological ideas to African farmers, who probably are ready to receive them, but are not going to necessarily adapt those technologies without appropriate education, assistance in credit to buy those, the inputs that are going to be needed to the micro dosing or use other kinds of technologies.
CLANCY: You've gone up to Capitol Hill, talked to the lawmakers, and you are well aware of the fact that in the U.S., in other countries, food aid is often a very political issue. People want to control it. People want to be able to say that, you know, we pushed to feed these hungry people. Are the lawmakers getting this point?
OFFENHEISER: Well, with the last, the debate on the last farm bill, which just ended in July, this issue was discussed, and the Bush administration actually pushed a position that at Oxfam, we fundamentally agree with, which was that food aid could actually be delivered more effectively and with greater -- with cost to the American taxpayer if we actually in fact bought some of the food locally, in the local markets. Which has a number of positive effects. It stimulates the local market. It helps the local farmers by investing in their production, and it gets food to the needy faster, and it lowers the cost by 50 percent.
Congress actually looked at this and decided it will experiment with a pilot project, but under incredible pressure from American agricultural producers and shippers, basically wouldn't actually adopt this provision.
What we've really got to do is look at what are the needs of Africa at this particular point in time, and really build the institutional capacity in Africa to deliver agricultural technology as well as health technologies to those populations.
It's only in Africa currently where those institutions have disappeared or been severely eroded, where we're seeing these kinds of repetitive crises over and over again.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CLANCY: Raymond Offenheiser recently testified before the U.S. Congress about the urgent need for aid reform.
Well, a former Sudanese lost boy carries the flag for the United States at the Beijing games. We're going to hear from Lopez Lomong after this short break. Don't go away.
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CLANCY: Welcome back to INSIDE AFRICA. We want to give you a quick look at some of the stories that are making headlines around the continent. Libyan and U.S. diplomats signing a cooperation agreement that clears the way for restoring full diplomatic relations. This deal settles all lawsuits filed against Libya by American victims of terrorism. Several pending cases stemmed from the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland.
The oil-rich Bakassi peninsula is now officially controlled by Cameroon. Nigeria withdrew all claims to the disputed territory, in compliance with the 2002 international court ruling. Now, this dispute almost sparked a border war during the 1990s. Nigeria says it still has nearly 300,000 citizens living in the region.
A Nigerian defense spokesman tells Reuters News Agency the country will send 850 soldiers to Somalia to help with African Union peacekeeping efforts. The AU currently has a force of around 2,200 troops in Somalia. Nigeria's contribution still leaves the AU force well short of its planned 8,000 peacekeepers.
Well, let's turn for a couple of minutes here to the Beijing games. One of the former lost boys of Sudan made a high-profile showing even before the competition started in Beijing. Distance runner Lopez Lomong carried the flag for the United States at the opening ceremony. He called it the most exciting day of his life, and says he's honored to have been chosen by his U.S. teammates.
Now, Lomong immigrated to the United States back in 2001, and became a U.S. citizen only a year ago. His odyssey began at the age of 6, when he was kidnapped by rebels in his native Sudan. He managed to escape, and spent the next 10 years in a Kenyan refugee camp, until a New York family took him in. Lomong is also a member of Team Darfur, a coalition of athletes that is trying to raise awareness about the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LOPEZ LOMONG, U.S. RUNNER: For China, they have to do a little bit more, or even not only China. Also, I would like -- I hope other countries, you know, will, you know, will be inspired by my story, and also be able to learn more about what happened, because I lived in that life before, and I lived in a situation whereby like, you know, death and life. And now for, you know, for the hope other countries also will be out there, you know, looking at all these -- this history.
And you know, a little kid from, you know, from the camp came all the way and now is a, you know, representing and leading the United States of America team.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CLANCY: Last December, Lomong was reunited with his Sudanese family for the very first time in 16 years.
Well, the West African country of Togo has won its first ever Olympic medal, thanks to a kayaker who has only been there once in his life. Benjamin Bukpeti (ph) took the bronze medal in the men's single kayak slalom, surprising everyone, including Benjamin. He came to the competition ranked 56th in the world. Maybe that's why he got so excited, he snapped his paddle in half. You just saw that.
Bukpeti was born and raised in France, but his father is Togolese. He says he's now going to have to go back home and visit Togo sometime soon.
Well, you can keep up with all the Olympic action on your mobile device. Just go to cnnmobile.com/beijing08. There, you can read the latest headlines from the games, view Olympic videos, track the medal count, and much, much more. You can also submit your own photos for our fan zone and view the photo gallery. Be sure to sign up for free gold medal SMS alerts if you want them for your favorite country.
Well, that has to do it for this week's show. Isha Sesay will be back next week with a brand new edition of INSIDE AFRICA. Thanks for being with us.
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