Nature brings drought, capitalism

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A catastrophe equivalent dozens of Hiroshimas is underway in Africa: mass starvation.

With drought has come famine. • GAMBIA CHAD GUINEA UPPER SUDAN But the misfortunes of nature do SIERRA (IVORY NIGERIA • ETHIOPIA not explain why so many will die for lack of food, in a rich world. EQUAT. UGANDA: $ÓMA MAYBE 150 million people in Africa are currently facing malnutrition or starvation. Several hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions, will die of starvation in the next few months.

The immediate cause is drought and an epidemic which has decimated cattle in many countries.

In 18 of the states hit by drought, food production has been halved in the last two years. The main areas hit are in i*'est Africa, Ethiopia, the vantustans of South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland, and other parts of southern Africa.

100,000 dead In Mozambique, 100,000 people have already died of starvation in the last six munths in one province alone, and in eight of ten provinces half of the population is suffering from drought. But Ethiopia is worst affected. Three million people there are directly threatened by famine.

Il is above all for economic and social reasons that drought has such terrible consequences today. It is the result of the present organisation of African agriculture.

Subsistence agriculture, w.iin used to allow the population to get through droughts somehow or other, no longer has more than a secondary role.

Must effort for modernisation and rationalisation is put into export products - coffee, cocoa, groundnuts, fruit, vegetables. These crops get the best land and the most modern techniques, but the African people get little benefit. The produce goes directly to the industrialised countries.

The resulting income to the African states goes mostly in prestige projects, bureaucratically-bungled development schemes, military spending, and luxury living for the ruling class.

The short-sighted pursuit of profit and bureaucratic prestige is also decimating the fundamental resources of Africa. In the West African states on the edge of the Sahara, the desert is gaining ground year by year.

Acurding to the United Nations r'ood and Agriculture Organisation, African subsistence production per head has been declining for 10 years, and is now 11c below the 1969-71 level.

The world slump of 1979-82 compounded the evil. Falling primary product prices cut the revenues of the underdeveloped states, and made them less able to import food.

All this happens at a time when the world has never had su much food.

Crop

The EEC currently has a grain crisis' - because next year's crop is expected to be so big! According to the US minister of agriculture, 290 million tuns of grain are piled up in the stocks of the rich countries, while the food deficit of Africa is only 2.6 million tons for 1983-4.

The millions of deaths which will come in the next few months are not rue to a natural catastrophe. The blame iies with the crazy and criminal way of operating which capitalism impuses on suciety.

(Adapted from the French socialist wn! ¿ Lutte Ouvriere).

Drought affectr areas:

moderate MOROCCO

severe MAURITANIA CAPE VERDE MALI IS. NIGER SENEGAL BISSAU GUINEA VOLTA.

LEONE 'COAST GHANA

FUNISIA

ALGERIA LIBYA EGYPT BI N LIBERIA CAMEROON:) (CENT. XER. REP. TOGO GUINEA ZAIRE GABON (CONGO KENYA RWANDA BURUNDI TANZANI ANGOLA:

MIBIA -DJIB MOZI LIQUE MADAGASCAR Areas of conflict Outbreakı WAZILAND rinderpe:

deeper US for a withdrawal of troops.

Meanwhile the Britis government continues to bac Reagan.

The imperialists have not gr their way - neither have thei opponents. Thus the woun simply becomes deeper, mor infected and harder to cure. Th cynics of the US State Depar ment can, however, take grir pleasure in the scene of PLA leader, Yasser Arafat, embrac ing the Egyptian President an pinning his hopes on the Fe plan. He has denounced thei plan, the Reagan plan, but hi pronouncements have register ed another shift to the righ within the PLO leadership - no a new shift, but an old drift nor consolidated and made official.