ALMOST 40 million people are now threatened by hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report released in June.
It estimated that in the Horn of Africa 20 million people need more than 2 million tons of emergency food. Another 18 million people are at risk in southern Africa.
Yet despite the FAO's warning, just one of many over the last two years, donors have promised only 2.6 millions tons of emergency food as against the 6 million needed to prevent a catastrophe.
Famine in Africa is usually presented by the press and western earnings" governments the result of sudden 'disasters' - a drought, a war. Yet Africa lives through a daily disaster of almost absolute poverty. When any factors worsens, there is simply no margin left to deal with the crisis.
What governments and their hired scribes deliberately confuse is the symptoms of African poverty with the causes to obscure one of the fundamental failings of the world capitalist system: that advanced countries continue to derive much of their great wealth from the exploitation of the majority of the world's population in the Third World. George Bust - betions for arms. but not even peanuts for the starving PagE : K 22 In sub-Saharan Africa, one in every two people lives in absolute poverty. The number of children dying in the 1980s, was higher than in the previous decade. The rate of infant mortality is 180 per 100 (10-15 in the advanced countries).
Only 65 per cent of the urban population, and 26 per cent of the rural population, has access to safe drinking water. Life expectancy at birth is 49 years for men and 53 years for women. Only 32 per cent of Africans can reached $340 billion. Africa's three times its annual export read and write; the figure is less than 10 per cent for women.
Wealth drains from the poorest pasts of the world to the richest. According to the UN's Human Development Report 1990 'The net annual transfer of resources to the developing countries has been reversed from a positive flow of $42.6 billion in 1981, to a negative flow of $32 billion in 1988'. The UN estimates that debt-related transfer of resources is at $50 billion.
Africa has suffered from capitalist de-development. Per apita GDP ceased growing ir 1974, stagnated until 1977, and declined from then on. It has dropped to the level it had reached in 1960 - Africa has been rolled back three decades economically.
Long-term debt
The long-term debt of sub-Saharan Africa, $6 billion in 1970, has now reached $340 billion. Africa's foreign debt is 112 per cent of its annual gross domestic product, and three times its annual export earnings. Just servicing the debt costs 30 per cent of annual export earnings. The countries of Africa inherited from colonialism economies highly dependent on the export of a few primary products. The European powers did little to develop Africa's infrastructure other than to expedite export of raw materials to advanced capitalist countries.
After independence, corporations based in the former imperialist metropolis continued to own and operate these major export industries, and little capital was invested in other sectors.
Monopolisation of international marketing by multinational corporations kept prices paid to African countries to an absolute minimum.
In most cases the governments of newly-independent Africa did not challenge this control by foreign companies. The ruling elites, often having been directly fostered by the colonial power, formed a close alliance with these imperialist companies and their governments.
Too poor to raise their own capital for investment, and with most of the profits generated by foreign companies exported, African countries were unable to diversify their economies.
Primary commodities account for more than 90 per cent The heart-rending pictures can sometimes divert attention from the real causes of thi of the continent's exports. Most sub-Saharan economies depend on no more than three export commodities for 80 per cent of their total exports, making them especially vuinerable to fluctuations in a world market over which they have no control.
primary commodity prices collapsed beginning in the mid-1970s. Prices for Africa's most important commodities have fallen almost 50 per cent since 1980. In 1986, average real commodity prices were at their lowest level this century. They have continued to fall.
Exports
As a result of the massive drop in export earnings African countries were forced to borrow massively Western governments, banks and institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in order to buy essential imports (often staple foods).
The policies of the IMF and the World Bank plunged these countries into even deeper crisis. IMF/World Bank loans come with stringent conditions.
Governments have no choice but to implement 'Structural Adjustment Programmes' and comply with World Bank and IMF advice. A refusal results in a cut-off of further loans from all public or private sources in the capitalist world.
The thrust of these programmes is to force the debtor to export more and spend less. Countries are forced to slash spending, remove protection for domestic goods and allow unrestricted penetration by multinational corporations.
Budgets for health, education
foreign debt is 112 per cent of its annual gross domestic product, and