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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Oral Statement by Andrew Natsios
Administrator, USAID
Before the House International Relations Committee
June 13, 2002
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would first like to submit written testimony for the record that is much longer than what I'm presenting here now.
Mr. Chairman, I was responsible for running the humanitarian relief effort in the southern Africa drought of 1991-92 in the first Bush Administration. It was the worst drought in Africa in the 20th Century. Twenty-four million people were at risk, twice the number as in this famine and we required 3 million tons of relief food -- once again, twice what we require in this.
No one ever talks about the southern Africa famine of 1991-92, because we caught it at the incipient stage, before there was a large-scale loss of life, and succeeded in preventing a food emergency mutating into a famine.
We intend to do exactly the same thing we did ten years ago in this drought. I want to make that commitment to you today, as an instruction from President Bush and from Colin Powell. We are not going to let this turn into a famine.
I've watched famines up close; they are horrific events, only comparable to genocide in the horror they engender. During the North Korean famine, I watched the mass burial of bodies. I was in China, on the border with North Korea, and I actually watched the bodies being put in mass graves during that famine that killed 2.5 million people.
I want to emphasize that the President has given us instructions not to politicize food aid anywhere in the world and I want to just indicate the evidence of that.
We announced, last Friday, with no fanfare, another 100,000 tons of food for a very severe food, nutritional problem that is ongoing in North Korea. There are lots of issues around that. We announced that. North Korea is not our best friend. We're certainly not doing that for the North Korean government. We're doing that to avoid serious nutritional problems in that country, and across the world.
We led the relief effort in Afghanistan. Seventy-five percent of the food that went into Afghanistan last fall and this spring came from the United States through WFP (World Food Program).
Once again, in this drought, this food emergency, 75 percent of the food that has been pledged to WFP as of this date comes from the United States Government, from AID and the United States Department of Agriculture.
Now let me talk a little bit about what evidence we have that there is a food emergency, other than news headlines, which you always have to be careful of, because half the time they're late telling us that there's a problem. Other times, they exaggerate it; other times, they understate it.
We need to get reports based on technical assessments in the ground. We began sending teams out to confirm the reports from the AID missions last December. They were facing an incipient food emergency.
We began sending teams out in April and May of this year with WFP and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. We put people from AID on all those teams in all of the countries in the region to get an on-the-ground assessment of how severe the crisis was.
We now have evidence. There are eight of fourteen pre-famine indicators present in Zimbabwe and six of fourteen pre-famine indicators present in Malawi. Those are the two most severely-affected countries right now.
Are there food insecurity in other countries? Yes. But Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, and at this point Zambia, are not facing famine. They are facing a food emergency but not a famine.
The other two are further along in the food emergency because the level of nutritional stress is more severe.
Pre-famine indicators are evidence that people are running out of their coping mechanisms to deal with food stress, and we look for those in any famine or pre-famine condition to determine whether or not we are facing a food crisis.
Because if you see hungry children on TV, or starving children, if you see mass graves, it is too late to intervene, because it takes between two and three months to order food in Washington, then go purchase the food in the Midwest grain markets, ship it, it takes a month to get to Africa, offload it, and then move it sometimes through rough terrain to remote areas.
So the time to act is before, not after we begin seeing these pre-famine indicators accelerating. So we're not at a famine yet. We call it a pre-famine stage. There is a food emergency taking place and if we do not act, we will see by late this fall a famine on our hands, and widespread deaths.
Now let me talk about what the United States Government has done since last fall.
Last December, we began our first ordering of food. To date, we have ordered 136,000 tons, ordered, purchased and shipped 136,000 tons of food from the Midwest grain markets, that is either, in various stages of processing. By July, a month from now, 100,000 tons of that food will have arrived.
It began arriving in April. Tonnage arrived in May. It is arriving in June as we speak. It's being offloaded at four African ports and another 200,000 tons of food has been committed as of May from the Emerson Trust.
I want to thank this committee and I want to thank the Congress -- I wasn't in office when it happened; it happened in the 1990's -- for the creation of the Emerson Trust, named after Bill Emerson from Missouri, a good friend of mine, because that trust has allowed us the flexibility we need to order the food, up front.
So that decision was taken in May, to take 275,000 tons of wheat that is earmarked, and then we're going to convert that, switch it into, or transfer it into corn, which is the principal staple people eat in Southern Africa, and in vegetable oil, and in pulses, beans for protein. We need beans for protein, and the fats from the vegetable oil, and the caloric intake is really from the corn.
If you do not have a balanced diet, you can have people survive but have serious nutritional disorders like protein deficiencies and other deficiencies that you can see in a famine where the diet is not balanced.
Of course, oil is more expensive than corn is and beans are more expensive than corn, and that's why we have to balance the, what we call the "food basket" of people receiving assistance.
So the total U.S. commitment to date is about 335,000 tons of food toward this emergency. That is not the end of our commitment. That is what's been done to date. We have a meeting twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday, of an interagency meeting, organizing and planning the response to this relief effort and decisions are taken on a rolling basis week by week, depending on the reports from the WFP and the NGOs as to what other donors are doing.
We cannot do all of this alone. I just have to say we need the help of the Canadians who are huge food producers, the Japanese government which contributes a lot of money toward food in emergencies around the world, and particularly our European donor allies and friends on this issue.
So we will be the principal donor, as we are now. We will continue to be out in front but we cannot do this alone.
Let me just say that we have been working also through the USAID missions. There are AID missions, of course, in Zimbabwe, in Zambia and Malawi, and in Mozambique, that are working with the NGO community and the WFP to coordinate the planning for this.
It is not simply a function in these emergencies of ordering the food. The port facilities, WFP informs us, are probably all right to handle the intake of the 1.2 million tons of corn we need to bring into the region.
However, the logistics systems have deteriorated in the last ten years. Some of the storage facilities in some countries, some roads and some train systems in some countries are not in the same condition they were in ten years ago when we had the first, the major famine, drought of 1991-92.
So Jim Morris and I have been talking; he and I were in Rome together at the World Food Summit, and we discussed the logistics system. The big problem we're going to have is in-country, what we call the tertiary and secondary distribution once it gets to the capital cities.
That is going to become a problem just in terms of volume because this drought and food emergency is so severe.
Let me mention, now, the risks that we're facing in terms of the conditions on the ground. In no famine is relief food ever the whole answer to everything.
The total need in the region for food is 3.2 million tons of food. 2 million tons of that has to come through commercial means. Half the population of Zimbabwe, the most severely affected, is at risk right now. But half the population are either middle class or upper class and they have enough money to purchase food, if only there were enough food in the markets at a reasonable price.
One of the things that happens in famines -- it's a phenomenon in 90 percent of famines -- is people's incomes collapse as there's a dramatic rise in food prices. We are seeing a 300 to 400 percent rise in food prices, particularly right now in Malawi and Zimbabwe, which is of great alarm to me, because when you see those rises it means an increasing number of middle class people with money cannot buy food because the price is too high.
And so one of the strategies beyond food assistance, that Jim and I have talked about, is a commercial strategy to strengthen the commercial markets, to get more commercial food in at a normal price, so that middle class people who have resources can buy food.
We should not be using money to buy food for the middle class when they have money if only the prices were at a reasonable level. So that's a major market-oriented intervention that we will consider. We did this in Somalia ten years ago. We did it in Afghanistan, and now we do realize that this cannot be just humanitarian assistance.
We have two reports in Zimbabwe of politicized feeding, which is to say one report is from a Danish Physicians For Human Rights, another report is from WFP, that people have been chosen for feeding based on political loyalties.
In one line, we had eyewitness accounts of children being taken out of feeding lines in a school, for supplemental feeding, whose parents were supporters of the democratic opposition in the last presidential election to President Mugabe.
That is unacceptable. President Bush has said we will not politicize aid, but we're not going to let other people politicize aid that we give them.
Food will be distributed by our standards and by WFP and NGO standards, an accepted standard, neutrally based on need--neutrally based on need.
And so we need to make very clear markers now, that in no country is it acceptable that food be distributed based on political loyalties.
One Catholic organization suspended food in one area of Zimbabwe because, once again, they were being prohibited from feeding opposition committee members, opposition movement members.
The food system of Zimbabwe is the most fragile, essentially for two reasons. One is the government has decided that food must be, in order to be imported commercially into the country, purchased by the State Grain Board, rather than privately in the private market, and because the Grain Board is using a differential price that is not competitive, they are unable to bring the volume of food in for the commercial markets, so a number of areas of the country, the commercial food markets have completely collapsed.
There is no food even for upper class people to buy in those markets. It has disappeared. That is a very dangerous sign, and we have urged the Zimbabwean government to reverse its policy in this because it will affect our ability to deal with the volume of the famine that's facing us.
The third problem we face is the shutdown of the commercial farms and I'm not going to go through here--it's in my testimony--on the consequence of that. But let me just tell you why that's important.
The commercial farms, before the confiscation of this land by the Mugabe government, provided about 40 to 50 percent of the corn or maize requirements of the country, and, generally, Zimbabwe was an exporter of maize prior to this change of policy.
The problem with it is this: there is a drought. It is affecting production, but the commercial farms are irrigated and the dams are full of water. There's more than enough water in the dams for irrigated agriculture, but the farmers are not growing food, either because their farms have been taken over and no one's farming them, or they're not planting because the government has a policy of only paying $40 per ton when the world price for corn is $200.
So you can see there's a huge disincentive for anybody to plant when they're in fact going to be losing huge amounts of money since they won't be able to even make a portion of their costs.
And so we need to urge the government to reverse their policies in terms of pricing, because it will affect the production of food in the country from the commercial farms that are irrigated, that can use the dams that are full of water resources right now.
And the sooner that's done, the better off we're all going to be and the better off the people will be in the country.
The political crisis in the country is also distracting policy makers in neighboring countries because it is affecting food markets in other countries. That is the thing that's disturbing us a little bit in this, the turmoil in Zimbabwe that's taken place over the last year, in particular, and the problems in the election. I think it was probably one of the most abusive elections in the Third World that we've seen in recent memory. It is affecting the ability of regional governments to deal with this emergency in a cooperative and collaborative way.
We have never had a famine in recorded history in a democratic government and we do not want one now. We do not want a famine in these countries, given the progress that countries like Mozambique has made. Mozambique has made more progress, as they have a 12 percent growth rate in their economy. They're one of the stellar performers in the developing world.
Their food emergency is not as severe. In fact they will be selling food from northern Mozambique to Malawi and Zimbabwe -- that's going on right now -- because they actually have food surpluses in northern Mozambique.
If you look up there (pointing to chart), you see where the major circle is of red. Right to the right of that, in Mozambique, there was no drought and there was a large surplus produced and that will be shipped in commercially, if we can get the pricing system right.
Let me just finish by saying we are committed to stopping this horrendous event from occurring. I think we've caught it in time. We started working last December and we will continue to redouble our efforts to ensure that this drought does not turn into a famine.
Thank you very much.
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Last Updated on: January 02, 2009 |
