Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation.
Letwin Mhande, a 36-year-old mother of four takes her turn to load an allocation of four buckets of water per family per day at a community run borehole in Epworth, an informal settlement east of the Zimbabwe capital Harare, on May 23.JEKESAI NJIKIZANA/Getty Images
Along with the largely ignored humanitarian crisis in Sudan, another deadly calamity is developing in Africa. Encroaching food shortages in the Central African nations of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi are worrying relief agencies and official international bodies like the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the World Food Programme, and UNICEF.
The region is enduring its worst dry spell in more than a century. Owing to an El Niño-induced failure to rain throughout February, subsistence and cash crops stopped growing. Famine is the expected outcome for half of all Zimbabweans and the situation is similar in Zambia and Malawi. The UN says that 18 million people in all three countries, plus Botswana and parts of Mozambique, need urgent assistance. Malawians are reported to have started eating grass seed to survive and a group of villagers were hospitalized after eating poisonous tubers.
Most African subsistence farming is rain-fed rather than irrigation-reliant. In countries like Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, many millions survive primarily on food they grow themselves. Intensifying climate change is thus exacerbating existing hunger and poverty. Most crops are harvested in April in the region, and this year, an estimated 60 per cent of all crops failed or were stunted. About 5 million tons of maize are required to stem this season’s famine, but the World Food Programme and other emergency suppliers are short of food and cash.
Moreover, as the white maize that most Central and Southern Africans consume daily as their staple source of food atrophies on their own plots, it has also become incredibly expensive to buy it in the markets. This year cowpeas, pigeon peas, and potatoes also failed. Livestock died. Food prices have risen 82 per cent in the hardest hit areas. Even before this current crisis, the World Food Programme was feeding millions of Zimbabweans, largely with maize from North America.
The invasion of Ukraine has added to the food calamity in Africa. Wheat from both Russia and Ukraine has become more costly, as has Ukrainian cooking oil and whatever maize Ukraine has managed to export.
The situation in Zimbabwe is particularly harrowing because, unlike its neighbours, the autocratic rulers of the country long ago abandoned concern for the bulk of their people. More interested in profitable returns from gold, lithium, cobalt and ferrochrome, President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his associates show little interest in the plight of those 6 million Zimbabweans that OCHA says are about to suffer serious food shortages leading, in some cases, to starvation. Zimbabwe is rampantly corrupt, and the leaders of the government are focused more on what they can personally purloin than on how best to subsidize maize imports for the poor.
OCHA reports that drought already imperils potable water as well as food availability. It estimates that 2.6 million Zimbabweans will have trouble obtaining clean water; already 46 per cent of Zimbabweans lack access to basic water-borne sanitation systems. A cholera outbreak that began last year is still needlessly killing rural Zimbabweans. Fifty districts are affected. In early April, there were 31,000 cases and 591 deaths.
Shortages of drinkable water and food insecurity put the young and old, as well as nursing mothers, at risk, especially in the very hot months of October and November. Even citizens in Harare, the capital city, can no longer rely on adequate water supplies from their municipal system. Because of corruption and mismanagement, Harare long ago let municipal water facilities deteriorate; at one point several years ago, the city ran out of cash to pay for chlorine. Homeowners dug artesian wells as quickly as they could.
Drought has also slowed the flow of the Zambezi River, causing serious shortages of electric power from the mighty Kariba Dam. The government also lacks the ready cash with which to replace lost Kariba energy with power from outside its borders.
Power blackouts, difficulties in accessing water, and hunger all contribute to educational declines. OCHA indicates that an estimated 1.24 million Zimbabwean students will be negatively affected by the drought by dropping out of school as fees become unaffordable. In earlier El Nino-accelerated regional rainfall failures, 3 per cent more pupils left classes for good than in normal years.
An immediate answer to the crisis is that the World Food Programme needs increased resources to provide assistance to prevent acute hunger. But attention also needs to focus on a longer term solution: new water retention systems must be built to help Africans withstand weather patterns resulting from El Niño-triggered droughts and global warming.