|
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
News Search
|
|
October 4, 2002, Friday Without aid now, this child, and millions more, will starve to death
Gethin Chamberlain In Lilongwe, Malawi IN the shade of the grass roof of a hut in a village at the end of a dirt road, in the heart of a country the tourist brochures call the warm heart of Africa, a young girl is dying. Madaloo James's eyes are bloodshot, her belly distended from the parasitic worms feeding inside her, her feet swollen from the oedema which starvation brings. Thirteen months old, she has weeks to live, perhaps less. Joseph and Catherine, her parents, know she is slipping away from them; they know because in March, they watched her two-year-old sister, Chikondi, die the same way. In Malawi and across southern Africa, a famine is coming, a famine worse than any seen in a decade. The United Nations says 18.4 million people are at immediate risk in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho, Mozambique, Angola and Swaziland. In Malawi, a country with a population of 10 million, 3.3 million are in danger. By the new year, they will begin dying in their hundreds of thousands. In Kanyopola village, central Malawi, the village in which Madaloo will die, the people are eating mice to stave off the inevitable. Now even the mice are scarce, and they chew on the seed pods and on discarded maize husks. They have not eaten a proper meal for weeks. In the far south of the country, women are wading into crocodile-infested waters to pluck lilies which they will grind into a bitter gruel. The crocodiles are exacting a heavy toll - 14 women from one village alone - but the risk is outweighed by the fear of starvation. Catherine said: "We are fearing for the life of our little baby. We have some maize growing which may mature in December. We are praying that until that time, Madaloo is healthy, because this is exactly what happened with Chikondi. "She is obviously underweight. She is weak, she has all these sores on her body. Sometimes she cries a lot, especially when the sores are itching. "They itch so much, but often now she doesn't cry at all." The famine has been blamed on a mixture of political blunders and natural disasters. Severe flooding ruined the crop last year and washed away the fertile top soil, devastating this year's harvest. In normal circumstances, the country would have fallen back on the reserves of grain stored in the silos outside the capital, Lilongwe, large enough to store five years supply. But the silos are empty. In 1999, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union told Malawi to privatise its grain reserve. The newly-privatised reserve borrowed from commercial banks to buy grain, but it could not service its debts and in 2001, the IMF told it to sell the reserves. The sale coincided with the failure of the crops. Malawi now needs 600,000 metric tonnes of food to stave off starvation, 240,000 tonnes of that in the next six months. The UN, which says the crisis is worsening faster than anticipated, estimates the cost of the food aid at GBP 98 million, but the World Bank has promised only GBP 31 million to help. Thousands of people died after the failure of the harvest last year, and yesterday, Baldwin Chiyamwaka, who works for the World Vision charity in Malawi, said the country needed immediate food aid to save the starving, and seed and fertilisers to give people the chance to plant crops that would ensure their longer term survival. Graeme Young, the Scottish communications officer for World Vision, said money was needed urgently to avert a humanitarian disaster. He added: "Hundreds of thousands of people will die unless aid arrives soon. "Do we need to wait to see the images of a dead child before we give money? Won't a suffering child do?"
|
|
||||
|
................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
|||||||
