The Food Crisis in Southern Africa: The Challenge to Sustainability.

Real Audio of Briefing

        MR. BALLARD (sp): Welcome this morning to the Washington Foreign Press Center of the Department of State. My name's David Ballard (sp). I'm the acting director of this center today. And it is my pleasure to present to you a briefing by Mr. Andrew Natsios, who is the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. Mr. Natsios will talk to us about his upcoming trip to Southern Africa and the efforts of his agency and the U.S. government in that region to relieve some of the serious conditions that are affecting that region.

       Before that, though, he has a rather exciting new initiative to announce to you. It's called the West Africa Water Initiative. And he has brought along a couple of his partners in that initiative. And he would like to introduce them, and then they will take questions for a very short time, two or three minutes, on that issue before moving on to Mr. Natsios' theme-setter and responding to your questions.

       Thanks very much.

       MR. NATSIOS: We just had a press conference upstairs, but some of you weren't there, so we're going to reannounce what we just announced a few minutes ago, which is a $41 million partnership between a number of organizations, the principal ones of which are the Hilton Foundation, which initiated this; World Vision, which has been a partner of Hilton Foundation for 12 years; and the United States Agency for International Development, to do water projects in Ghana, Mali and Niger.

       And I'd like to introduce -- we have Ambassador Diatta from Niger here today, and we have also the second counselor of the Mali Embassy, Mr. Toure, here.

       And this initiative will be over three years. The AID component of this is $4.45 million in technical assistance in several areas, one of which is in the economic development area of water, particularly in the irrigation sector, in policy reform, and finally, in the involvement of women and girls in the management of water and water resources at the village level.

       If you have any questions on that, we would be glad to answer them.

       I'd also like to announce that I'll be leaving on Friday morning for a eight-day trip to Southern Africa; and then also accompanying Secretary Powell on his trip to the WSSD conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. I will be going Thursday of next week alone to that conference, and then the next week I'll be going with the U.S. delegation, which at this point is a broad delegation of all of the agencies that will be managing the U.S. government's announceables at the conference.

       They are -- of course, the delegation is being led by Secretary Powell.

       The administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, of the EPA will be going. The deputy secretary of Agriculture, the deputy secretary of HHS and myself will all be going to this conference to represent the United States. But the other reason I'm going to Southern Africa -- I'll be one day next week at the conference. The rest of the time will be in the countries of Southern Africa that have been affected by this very severe drought -- the most severe since the 1991-'92 drought.

       And I want to announce today that the United States is making an additional commitment of 190,000 metric tons of food to the Southern African region, worth $230 million. That totals a 50-percent commitment toward the World Food Program requirement of a million tons. So the United States has committed to almost 500,000 tons of food -- 50 percent of the need.

       As some of you may know, the EU has made a commitment not in tonnage but in percentage. They've announced that they will be contributing toward the requirement of 20 percent. The British have already made a $60 million pledge toward that, both through WFP and through the NGO community. So I think we're getting close to meeting the entire pledge.

       This is a very severe crisis; we aware of that. The enemy of all famine response and drought response is time. And I think we caught this in time; we started shipping food in the spring of this past year. United States -- of all of the pledges made so far formally to WFP, 70 percent come from the United States.

       And we are working with both the World Food Program and the NGO community -- World Vision, which is here today; CARE; Catholic Relief Services; Save the Children and a number of other NGOs that are experts and distributors from the food aid are working with us in a number of these countries to make sure that -- particularly in remote areas -- that food gets out to people who are at risk. Right now there are about 75,000 tons of food that are on the high seas, from the United States.

       It will be arriving shortly in East -- Eastern coast of Africa. I'll try to get the exact figure here. We've already provided substantial -- shipped substantial food and it is being distributed now. So by the time December roles around, we expect to have distributed 500,000 tons of food.

       The most serious problem we're facing at this point is a problem with the -- not the public sector distribution of food but the private distribution of food through the markets. The perception among the public is that when there's an emergency -- a drought or civil war -- that all the food the people eat goes through NGOs or the U.N. or aid agencies, and that is not the case. A large percentage of the food goes through the private markets.

       The reason people die in famines is because there's usually a collapse of family income because of drought or civil war or economic collapse, at the same time there's a dramatic rise in the availability and the cost -- a dramatic reduction in the availability of food because of dramatic rises in prices. And so you might have a 700 percent increase, a thousand percent increase in food prices over six months, which we had in Somalia 12 years ago, and then a collapse of family income. So people starve because they simply can't buy the food that exists on the market.

       So one of the things that we focus our attention on is monitoring the private markets to see whether they are still functional, whether food prices are at a reasonable level and whether family income is adequate to access those markets.

       But WFP has been doing some very good analysis of what the overall private sector requirement is. And the concern we have at this point is the economic policies that have been put in place, and particularly in Zimbabwe, are such that the private markets are becoming increasingly dysfunctional. There is a disparity between the market price of food and the price that the government grain board is paying for maize, for corn. And that disparity means that commercial farmers and commercial companies will not import food into Zimbabwe because if they only get paid the public sector price, they lose money. And so the incentives are all wrong.

       The other problem is that the central government in Zimbabwe is confiscating farms at exactly the wrong time. A drought caused the food emergency. However, the irrigated sector of agriculture in Zimbabwe is irrigated and it is the big commercial farms. The commercial farming reservoirs are full of water. There is water available, even if there's a second-year drought, to grow a crop, but the crops aren't being planted because the commercial farmers and farm workers have been evicted by the central government. We have urged them to reconsider their expropriation of these farms at a time when that really was the insurance policy for people to survive in a severe drought. Irrigated agriculture, of course, produces food when there is a drought because it is irrigated.

       The third thing the government has done is maintained an artificial rate of exchange for the Zimbabwe dollar. The problem with that is the black-market rate is so radically different than the -- which is the real rate; the black-market rate is in fact the real rate of the value of the Zimbabwe currency. The government has refused to do what the finance minister in Zimbabwe proposed to the president; the finance minister is doing is exactly the right thing, to say, basically, we'll have a floating exchange rate. Because of that disparity between the government rate for currency exchange and the rate at which money is exchanged in the black market, there is no incentive for people to import goods into the country, like seed and fertilizer and agricultural implements, but also for food aid itself on the commercial market.

       So the incentive system in Zimbabwe could well mean that while we have made a substantial progress toward a commitment of sufficient food to end the famine in the public sector, that the private markets are becoming increasingly dysfunctional.

       We also have reports from the Catholic Church, from NGOs, that in some areas the government is refusing to use the food aid that it has from its own resources to be distributed based on need. It's being distributed based on the political loyalty to the government. Which is to say, if you supported President Mugabe in the last election, you're a member of his party, you get fed; if you supported the other party, and you're a member of that party, they will literally take children out of feeding lines if they supported the opposition in the last election.

       That is outrageous, unacceptable. It is not our food that that is being done with; it's government food, but the food should be distributed, in a famine, based on need, not based on politics. So we urge the government to shift these policies before it's too late.

       I'd be glad to answer questions.

       Yes.

       Bruce Wilkinson, from -- vice president of World Vision -- and Steve Hilton's the president of The Hilton Foundation.

       If you have questions on the water, we can answer them jointly, or on the U.S. contribution toward the drought in Southern Africa -- I can answer those.

       Yes, sir.

       Q My name is Adu Asari, africanewscast.com. Some of the countries affected by the drought-related famine have refused to accept our genetically modified corn from the U.S. But it seems to me that the attitude is changing. My question is, do you think these countries have the proper approach to this situation if they don't want it?

       MR. NATSIOS: Sure. The first comment I would make: It's their country, and they need to make their own decisions. And we will respect their decision. That doesn't mean we agree with it. Let me just say, in a famine, people die if they don't have food. And that's what we're facing right now. So it seems to me the principle should be, how can we save the most number of lives with the resources we have? The United States provides food assistance around the world, and we have for seven years been providing assistance all over Southern Africa, I might add, in these same countries. And they knew we were providing it. And 30 percent of it is -- of maize produced in the United States is GMO -- is biotech -- is from biotech seeds. That's been going on for seven years. This is not new. I might also add that we eat that same food in the United States. We don't have a silo in the United States or a storage facility with food aid and then food that we eat in a separate location. The food that we buy to provide food assistance to the famine is the same food in the same markets that we purchased in the Midwest -- on the commercial markets. It's the same place that we purchase food for our grocery stores. My children and my wife and I have been eating genetically modified maize for the last seven years, and so have most Americans, and, I might add, most Canadians and Brazilians and Argentinian and Chinese and Indians.

       We are not the only ones that produce biotech crops. The Chinese -- a large part of the Chinese crop now is biotech seed. That's true in India, it's true in Canada, it's true in Australia, it's true in Argentina. And soybeans in Brazil, for example, are heavily biotech feed.

       So -- and I might also add, it's also in the commercial markets of Southern Africa because there are five varieties of maize that South Africa produces that are biotech maize. So the commercial markets right now in Southern Africa, some of the leading scientists in the world in biotechnology, in the seed area, are in South Africa; they're South African scientists, not American scientists, South African scientists. And they have been saying, "Wait a second now. We've been doing this for seven years. You've been buying the food. What's this controversy about?" The World Health Organization has just announced, just said there is no health risk.

       All of the seed that we produce in the United States has to go through a very rigorous, regulatory process, the federal government, before it can be used to grow food in the United States for domestic consumption. And it's the same food once again that we use for food aid abroad.

       So I would urge governments to reconsider. There is no health risk that anyone has been able to determine. There's been experiments run, there have been tests run for seven years now; 280 million Americans have been consuming this, along with people from many other countries. And in fact, I think biotechnology offers the chance to reduce hunger substantially in the developing world.

       So anyway, that's an answer to your comment.

       Q My name is James Batty. I am the correspondent for West Africa Magazine. Mr. Natsios, you explained that the severity of the food crisis in Southern Africa is probably, as you put it, due to climatic conditions and also certain government policies.

       MR. NATSIOS: Yes.

       Q You went to great extent to explain the policies in Zimbabwe. I wonder how is the distribution going in the other countries that are affected, and how would you respond to the Zimbabwe government claim that they think that the land policy may be tied to the severity of the crisis is nonsense because they claim that the severity is the same in other countries that don't have the land problem.

       MR. NATSIOS: There is one difference. The other countries don't have irrigated agriculture. Forty to 50 percent of the maize crop, four years ago, was produced from the commercial farms that are all irrigated. They have large reservoirs of water available. And drought, of course, if you've got water in your reservoir and there's a drought, you can still plant your crop and produce a crop. But there's been a 70 or 80 percent reduction in maize production in Zimbabwe that preceded, that preceded the drought.

       And once again, those reservoirs are full, we could use that water to plant a crop, but they are now arresting farmers. In fact, they've announced, anybody plants a crop this fall, and those commercial farmers are going to get arrested.

       So we've got a major problem on our hands in terms of what could have happened, which is, the insurance policy for Southern Africa had been the South African irrigated agricultural system and the Zimbabwe agricultural system, the commercial side, which is also irrigated. So it's unfair to compare that to Mozambique. Mozambique does not have much irrigated agriculture, nor does Mali, nor does Zambia. they're in a different circumstance.

       Q (Off mike.)

       MR. NATSIOS: Yes. The distribution in the other countries is going well. There's minimal -- there's some impact of the drought in Mozambique, but there's still maize crops, so the maize grown in Mozambique is being imported commercially into several of the neighboring countries, and we appreciate the cooperation of the Mozambique government with the transport of surpluses in their country. There's some food aid that will be used in Mozambique, but there was a maize crop in areas that were not affected by the drought.

       Malawi is severely affected, Zambia is severely affected, and Zimbabwe. These are the three most severely affected. Swaziland and Lesotho also are affected, but less severely.

       The distributions are going well in the other countries. There is a dispute now with the Zambia government over the GMO food. We've made an agreement, however with the Zimbabwe government. We fix one problem; we get another problem. In Zimbabwe, we've agreed to an exchange. We've taken 17,000 tons of GMO food, biotech food, corn, maize, that we just brought to the border, and the government is going to mill it and distribute it through their channels, and they're going to give us 17,000 tons of non-biotech maize, and we will distribute that without milling it. Okay? The dispute in Zimbabwe is not over the health consequence. The Zimbabwe government believes that the food is healthy.

       They're worried -- or they were worried that if they -- that some of this -- the grain could be used for seed and that some other countries like the Europeans might not accept animals that ate the grain. The problem is, the Europeans have already said, "We have no problem accepting animal products from a country that uses GMO food to feed their livestock with." So that's really a -- I think a irrelevant argument.

       However, that was the position of the Zimbabwe government. They said, "If you mill the grain, you can distribute all the biotech maize you want to. But we don't want it whole grain." So we made this exchange; we made the deal. (We/they ?) agreed, and it's about to go through. That should take care of the Zimbabwe problem with this particular shipment. We're still talking with the other government (sic). Malawi has said you can send all the biotech food in. Zambia's having some problems with it.

       Yes, sir.

       Q My name is Philip Tazi, and I'm with the African Correspondents Association. I recently drove down to the eastern shore of Maryland just to see what a drought looks like in the United States. And we know that -- I mean, most people living here would know that this has been a very long and hot summer. But very few people would imagine that this is a drought which comes in a way close to what we experienced in Africa.

       And I think the reason is obvious -- that the production and distribution mechanism for food here is very elaborate. What lessons -- what long-term goals are you taking with you to Africa that would really help to alleviate this problem? Because we seem to be having this problem going on and on in Africa, because no mechanism has really been put in place to make sure that, yes, there are going to be droughts and floods, but that the environment could better well be managed such that we wouldn't have this recurring problem.

       MR. NATSIOS: Let me first say that when Peter McPherson was the administrator of USAID in the Reagan administration -- a very good friend of mine; he's now the president of Michigan State University -- AID was spending $1.3 billion a year in agricultural development -- primarily in Africa, but all over the world -- 1.3 billion. When I arrived at AID a year and a half ago, we were spending 250 million. We dropped a billion dollars in 15 years. The entire donor community, the banks and the U.N. all withdrew in a major way from the agriculture sector, which I think was an unmitigated disaster.

       It was the worst decision made in the international donor community in the last 15 years because most poor people in the developing world, particularly in Africa, 70 percent of them live in rural areas, and they're farmers or herders or they're dependent on the farm. If you stop investing in agricultural development, people will not become more prosperous, people will not eat.

       And during the same period, there's been a dramatic rise in acute malnutrition rates in Africa. The rates were much lower 15 years ago. Why is that? Because African governments and donor governments and the international banks were investing in agricultural production and it was rising. It has not been rising the last 10 years. So one of the major initiatives of the Bush administration -- the president is a strong supporter of this, Colin Powell is a strong supporter, and I'm implementing it and I am personally committed to it -- is to reinvest in agriculture. And we've put a lot more money in the agriculture sector in the budget for fiscal '03, which is about to be voted on this fall in Congress.

       In fact, President Kufuor of Ghana, President Museveni of Uganda, and the president of Mozambique, all announced with me and Peter McPherson, the president of Michigan State, a new agricultural initiative in Africa to end hunger, at the World Food Summit in Rome about two or three months ago. And that has been joined by a number of other countries. I think Mali has joined, as I recall, and I believe Tanzania has now. That is an effort to introduce improved feed varieties, more irrigation, small-scale village irrigation, and to try to correct some of the misperceptions that agriculture in Africa doesn't work. It does work, but you've got to invest in it.

       The one fact I would give you is that 70 percent of the farms in India use irrigation -- 70 percent. It's a poor country. It's still a very rural country. Most people are farmers in India. There have been no famines in India since independence in 1949. And so the notion that poor countries have to have famines is nonsense.

       I might also add, there's been -- Amartya Sen, the great economist of famine, who is an Indian -- he's the president of Trinity College at Cambridge -- he has written -- he won the Nobel Prize for his economic work in famine. He says that there is no case in world history of a famine taking place in a democracy.

       Famines take place under dictatorships because dictatorial governments tend to care a lot less about their people than democracies do. So one of the best solutions to the problem of famine is to democratize, because then the people can put pressure on their governments to invest in agriculture and to get the food aid out when there's an emergency in a drought and the crop dies. But irrigation at the village level, I think, is the larger answer for Africa, with improved seed varieties.

       Yes, sir?

       Q My name is Bryma Fambili (ph), World Vision. There is very serious drought now in Mauritania and in the northwestern part of Senegal. And I was wondering whether USAID has a plan of maybe sending some of these food supplies there.

       MR. NATSIOS: We are looking at the drought situation in other areas of Africa, as well as Central America. There's a drought in Central America as well, in the rural area. This may be related to the "El Nino" phenomenon, the weather phenomenons that take place. There was a very severe drought in Southern Africa, it was the worst in the 20th century, 10 years ago, in 1991-92, when 23 million people were at risk. It was actually worse than this drought. It affected more countries and more people.

       But it is a very serious situation and it is beginning to affect other areas, as it is with the United States. As your colleague mentioned, there is a problem in the United States with drought. This is the worst drought in the United States, I think, since the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. But we are looking at those other. We have AID missions in a number of those countries, and they are sending reports in. That will have to be held separately. The commitment I made today is specifically for these countries in Southern Africa. But we do food aid programs in other areas of Africa when they're required.

       Yes, sir?

       Q Adu-Asare. I would like to know if there's a representative of the Desert Research Group here to explain to us what type of work they've been doing in Africa in the water area.

       MR. NATSIOS: I don't know if they're here. Did they come with us upstairs?

       Q Yeah.

       MR. NATSIOS: There are a number of desertification institutes, one at Cornell, one at --

       MR. : Bryma (ph) could probably respond to that, if that's okay.

       MR. NATSIOS: Sure. Absolutely. Go right ahead.

       Purdue University?

       MR. : No, the Desert Research Institute.

       MR. NATSIOS: No, but where do you -- you are World Vision, but you come -- you used to be at a university, did you not?

       MR. : Yeah, I was with the Desert Research Institute.

       MR. NATSIOS: Okay.

       MR. : Yeah, the Desert Research Institute has also been receiving funding from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation for I think about 10 years now. And they came in to help with well siting. In Ghana, getting ground water is very difficult. Water occurs within what we call fracture system, so you need to have some high technology to be able to detect where you can get viable wells. So the Desert Research Institute received a grant from the Hilton Foundation to help out in the West Africa Water Program in Ghana.

       So since then, they've been helping that area. They've done remote-sensing -- GRS work -- and then also with geophysics, where they've helped the water program in Ghana to increase their success rates from below 50 percent to about 60 percent in our drilling areas.

       Now they are also coming in with the Winrock Foundation and overlooking our small-scale irrigation in our project areas. They'll also be looking at long-term sustainability of ground-water supply systems in the three countries; that's Niger, Mali and Ghana. And then they are also looking at the water-quality analysis, making sure that the water that the villages drink is potable. And then they are also going to be doing a lot of database management. You know, we accrue a lot of data as we drill these wells. So they will be helping out in building databases for, you know, the data, and then how to use it as a feed loop to our ongoing projects, as well as technical- capacity building within the water program. So those are the areas that they'll be helping out.

       MR. NATSIOS: Thank you very much.

       Let me make one last comment. USAID produced for the U.S. delegation going to WSSD conference in Johannesburg a survey of all of the sustainable environmental activities of the U.S. government in all agencies. And this is the report. It's available as you walk out, is it not? And this is a summary report, but on the back is a CD-ROM of a 300-page report on -- it's cataloguing all of these -- some of them very interesting. Some of them are community-based, through NGOs, through AID. Some of them are scientific research that's been done, that's being used in the environmental area by different federal agencies. It's a very interesting report. Since my agency did it, I'm particularly interested. But a number of federal agencies participated in working with us on this. But I would urge you to look at it; it's very readable.

       Thank you very much.