THE WARNING signs are all over the place: Africa is once again facing famine. Drought has hit two places on the continent -- several countries in the south and Ethiopia further to the north. With politics and AIDS complicating matters, an estimated 20 million to 25 million people face a dire food crisis.
"It is the longest drought [in southern Africa] in 20 years," says Howard Leathers, a professor of agriculture and resource economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. "It was compounded in an ironic way by hard rainfall during the harvest which made it impossible to get the crop out of the field."
In Ethiopia, drought hit two successive harvests, according to Kenneth Hackett, executive director of the Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services (CRS), one of this country's largest aid organizations. "We are now seeing people leaving their home villages in search of food," he says.
These are the kinds of early warning signs that groups like CRS pick up to try to get the word out and get donations of food in to avoid the widespread starvation of 20 years ago -- when images of stick-figured adults and bloated-bellied children moved the world to action, including rock star Bob Geldof who organized the Live/Aid concerts.
But the aid groups are getting a tepid response from the nations that usually come to the rescue. Donations of food and money are not coming close to what is needed.
Partly this is because it is hard to get heard above all the noise about terrorism and Iraq. "There has been so much trauma for the general American public to absorb, I am not sure they can handle any more," Hackett says.
Also, there is a sense that "donor fatigue" has set in with Africa. "People have gotten inured to hearing about famines in Africa," says Alfred Somer, dean of Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health. "They have what people refer to as 'empathy burnout.' How long and how often are we going to continue to feed people who are in chronic need?"
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome makes the picture so bad that it looks hopeless. Affecting perhaps 30 percent of some countries' populations, AIDS removes victims from the work force in the prime of their lives -- they cannot help with planting and harvest -- and who then need additional nutrition to survive.
Politics further complicates the picture. In decades past, the starving citizens were seen as defenseless victims in need of help. Now they are often viewed as pawns in games played by their leaders who use the aid to further entrench themselves.
This is particularly true in Zimbabwe where more than 6 million of its 14 million people face food shortages that are due largely to the worst drought in two decades. But blame is also put on Zimbabwean President Robert G. Mugabe, who has been confiscating white-owned farms in a draconian land-redistribution program. The result is once-productive land lies fallow and a country that once had a surplus of food now asks for help.
Just to the north, in Zambia -- where 2.3 million of a population of 11 million face shortages -- the government turned down corn donated by the United States because it is genetically modified. Encouragement came from many in Europe where skepticism about genetically modified crops is high.
"A lot of people read that and, since we consume that corn, say, 'Our food is not good enough for them? Then, to hell with you,'" says Somer.
The issue is more complicated because farmers would undoubtedly use some of the kernels not as food, but as seeds with potentially disastrous consequences on the country's crop. A deal is in the works for Zambia to take ground corn meal. But from a public relations point of view, the damage is done.
"If I was advising Zambia, I would advise them to take the corn," says Leathers. "I'm not saying that there is no risk. There could be a small probability of a significant problem. ... But the analogy that makes some sense to me is that if the only way to get an injured child to the hospital is in a car without a child safety seat, then you would do that."
Situation in Malawi
Malawi, where 3.2 million of the country's 11 million people face shortages, also has suffered from questionable political decisions as its government sold the country's 167,000-ton strategic grain reserve last year when there were signs of a food shortage.
"Even in Africa, nobody sees those in famines as simple victims," says Siba N. Grovogui, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins University. "They are part of the political situation. It is not lost on many Africans that in the '80s when there was a big famine in Ethiopia, the country of Mali that was affected by the same drought did not have the same problems. ... But a country like Mali that is decent and democratic does not make the news."
Grovogui says that many who are tired of coming to Africa's aid view the continent as a single entity.
"Africa has 50-plus countries, yet people see any part of Africa as equal to the continent," he says. "People seem to think they are always coming to the rescue of Africa over the last 40 years, yet no one seems to ask the reasons that it is clearly some regions of Africa more than others that are asking for aid."
Ferry disaster
Grovogui notes how little attention was paid to a recent major disaster in Senegal when more than 1,000 died when a ferry capsized. Many saw it as just another mess in another messy African country.
"Yet did you know that Senegal actually lost more soldiers in the [1991] gulf war than any other country?" he says, referring to a plane crash that killed more than 200 troops returning from the war. "When people say Africans are always coming with a tin cup looking for aid, they forget about things like that."
Grovogui says that Americans are willing to accept the complexities of situations in Central Asia and the Middle East, but view Africa simplistically, in a way that allows them to turn their backs on the continent.
"Zimbabwe, I'm not even sure that story is so clear-cut," he says. "Mugabe in my book is a scoundrel, but it is not true to say that most of the large-scale agriculture in Zimbabwe provides food for that country. It is small producers all over Africa that provide most of the daily food intake."
He says that it was failure to deal with the land issue when Zimbabwe emerged from Rhodesia two decades ago with the vast majority of arable land in white hands that allows Mugabe to exploit it now. "Giving people land during a drought is stupid. He does that now because it serves him politically. But it is not the cause of the famine."
Hackett says aid groups have less than half the food that Africa needs next year. While he is hopeful that once people understand the situation the rest will be forthcoming, he doesn't want it to take the stick-figure images of hunger to make that happen.
"I still think Americans will respond fully and compassionately when they see people who are troubled for no personal reasons," he says. "They didn't steal, they didn't abuse anybody, they don't hate America."