BETWEEN PLAGUE AND FAMINE: ASSISTANCE AND

UNCLAS ROME 001496

SIPDIS


STATE FOR IO/EDA KOTOK
FAS FOR LREICH AND RHUGHES
USAID/FFP FOR LANDIS AND USAID/OFDA FOR MENGHETTI

FROM THE U.S. MISSION TO THE UN AGENCIES IN ROME

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: AORC EAGR ETRD FAO
SUBJECT: BETWEEN PLAGUE AND FAMINE: ASSISTANCE AND
DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

REF: ROME 001340

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Summary
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1. On the margins of FAO's March 1-5 Regional Africa
Conference in Johannesburg, FODAG DCM Michael Cleverley
and Agricultural Minister Counselor Geoffrey Wiggin
discussed and visited World Food Program (WFP),Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO),NGO, and USAID operations
in South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. Even beyond
the rhetoric and press play, the AIDS/HIV epidemic in
this part of Africa was, from our observation, a
humanitarian crisis of colossal historic proportions, one
that preoccupied most conversations and much of everyday
life, particularly in the countryside where people are
most helpless.


2. Observing the FAO's and WFP's use of US resources was
a primary objective, and we were happy to find some
outstanding people implementing sometimes life-saving,
other times income-expanding infrastructure-building
projects. This was especially important in Zimbabwe,
where a policy and public management implosion has
destroyed the governance process, particularly as it
applies to the critical questions of food and farming.
We also were impressed with the extraordinary efforts
NGOs were making to deal with the food aspects of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic.


3. The hand-off between WFP's food assistance and FAO's
emergency operations appeared smooth during discussions
at the Johannesburg headquarters for UN operations and
with the projects we visited in Zimbabwe. However, it
appeared somewhat anomalous that the US was funding
large-scale resources for WFP's food distribution and
FAO's long-term development activities (through 22
percent of the agency's regular budget),but was a
relatively minor player in FAO's emergency operations.
These FAO activities, often dependent upon extra-
budgetary largess from donor countries, were where FAO
appeared to be at its best, at least in AIDS- and
drought-plagued southern Africa.

End Summary

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WFP: Fully engaged and on top
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4. During a March 5 side trip from the FAO conference to
neighboring Swaziland, we received a better appreciation
of the food crisis emanating from the southern African
drought and HIV/AIDS epidemic. There, WFP targets the
most vulnerable households 41 percent of Swaziland's
population lives in female-headed households, 10 percent
in child-headed households. Working through NGOs, WFP
feeds about 150,000 people per month, 35,000 through
school feeding programs. In early 2004, 15 percent of
the country's population was beneficiary of WFP feeding.


5. With 38.6 percent of Swaziland's adult population HIV
positive, the effects of the epidemic were all pervasive.
We arrived early in the morning at a school feeding
program at the Khuphuka Neighborhood Care Point for AIDS
orphans and others unable to pay the $60/year tuition
fees. About 45 children, aged 5-18, gathered daily
around a shack with no professional teacher. When one of
our party organized singing and play for the children,
they danced and sang a song whose words ran, "We all have
AIDS, We are all dying from AIDS." The school feeding
was the main source of nutrition for these children. At
a nearby Manyeveni Primary School, enrollment had risen
by 20 percent (to about 540 children) due to WFP's school
feeding program that started up in July 2003. Located
next to the school was a volunteer-run clinic that
provided feeding for pregnant women and mothers of newly
born children. Again, the feeding program was the
primary source of nutrition for these people.


6. What we saw in Zimbabwe corroborated the crucial need
that we had found in Swaziland for highly targeted food
assistance for the growing numbers of helpless. On the

first morning we visited the Porta Farm squatter village
where WFP supported a school-feeding program and, through
a local NGO, home care and food for families suffering
from HIV/AIDS. Porta Farm was a very vulnerable
community of people, once farm laborers on large
commercial farms, and now uprooted and a pariah class for
their association with the previous economic order. The
Mugabe Government had dumped them on empty ground along
the main road to Harare where they now have to fend for
themselves. The only services available for this
community of 10,000 were ten water taps and a primary
school set up by an NGO. There are reportedly half a
million of such former farm workers in Zimbabwe.


7. Our WFP hosts had us at Porta Farm in time for the
school feeding. The food, coming from US and EU donors
via the WFP, was a mix of corn meal, corn-soya blend, and
vegetable oil cooked in large pots on wood fires by
volunteer mothers. The feeding was strictly for the
children. The headmaster of the schools said that
enrollment is 1200 children, and he estimated "very
conservatively" that were there no feeding the school
would not have more than 800 students. A year ago,
before the school feeding began, most of these children
were malnourished. That had changed with school lunches.
(The population of Porta Farm has virtually no land
available for producing their own crops. Many families
are trying to grow crops around their homes. The only
local sources of income are collecting firewood, which is
becoming increasingly difficult as more and more distant
sources have to be tapped, and fishing. The community is
located on the margin of an old commercial farm that has
a reservoir rich in fish. The Porta Farm people catch
fish and sell them to passing cars on the Harare road.)
The houses were makeshift shacks made of mud, straw,
cardboard, and tin whatever was available.


8. We made the morning rounds with a local NGO that
delivered home care. The nurse provided rudimentary
health care and WFP-supplied food to households suffering
from AIDS. In one case the house was on the verge of
collapsing on the invalid woman occupant she had had
the strength to build it when in good health, but as AIDS
weakened her, she was not able to correct the disrepair.
In another similar hut, a young man and his wife sat on
the dirt floor, exhausted by their AIDS infection,
watching their two infant children, as they wasted away.
WFP food kept them alive. Next, we went to the house of
two children whose parents had already died from AIDS.
At seven and twelve years old, these brothers had been
catapulted into the world alone. If such personal
l
alienation from life can be degraded into a symbol, it is
one of hopelessness shared by millions. But the seven
year old cooked WFP soy-maize blend, and the older kept a
garden. The nurse said the younger was smart and did a
lot.


9. Given the complete lack of services (people don't
even have the money for transportation to clinics to have
their physical problems diagnosed and treated they sit
and suffer),the food provided was medicine, sustenance
and a suggestion of hope. WFP's representatives were
fully engaged and on top these situations, as best as one
could, moving food efficiently into the homes of the
squatter village's worst cases.

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FAO: Successful Emergency Operations
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10. Like WFP, FAO appeared to have an outstanding staff
dedicated to alleviating the region's food and
agricultural production problems, especially through its
emergency operations. FAO's Regional Emergency
Coordinator for Southern Africa (RIACSO) is co-located
with WFP, UNDP, UNHCR, and other UN agencies in a modern
office complex outside Johannesburg. A collaborative
informal atmosphere was evident. RIACSO, which
coordinates all FAO emergency activities throughout
southern Africa, was under the capable leadership of its
director, Graham Farmer, an FAO official with long
experience in the region, especially Zimbabwe.



11. We observed FAO emergency operations in the field in
Zimbabwe. The drought of the last two seasons had
exacted its toll from these people, leading them to
question their normal ability to feed themselves.
Despite these doubts, and WFP food assistance and FAO
input support, primarily seeds, it was apparent that
under normal circumstances with supportive policies these
are good farmers with a means to sustain themselves.
Standing among the late planted corn and sorghum that
looked good now that the rains had finally arrived (any
planting done in September in anticipation of the normal
arrival of the wet weather was for naught as drought
continued),the seeds provided by FAO appeared
providential, while food assistance looked uneeded.
Nevertheless, when asked, the farmers inssted that after
the shortages of the past two yers, they had little
intention of selling any gran.


12. In one communal farming area, FAO had introduced
treadle pumps for irrigation. While FAOs wide advocacy
for this simple water technologythroughout Africa makes
it a development clichi,its economic power in this
instance was palpable Most of the people using treadle
pumps had built new homes over the past 2-3 years with
proceedsfrom their higher yields. We met with a group
o 14 farmers that had installed, with FAO help, thee
pumps. Their testimonials to the time savings and the
extra income generated through their use was persuasive.
The circumstances were attractiv for treadles the
water table was not too deep elow the surface and the
amount of water allowedfor irrigation most of the year.
FAO's active reresentatives were not mis-stepping by
jumping on the treadle pump wagon.


13. FAO's sub-regional director for southern and eastern
Africa, Victoria Sekitoleko, spent half a day traveling
with us, briefing, demonstrating, and answering our
questions. A former Ugandan Minister of Agriculture, Ms.
Sekitoleko appeared to be an exceptionally strong leader
who was conversant with the political leadership and well
known among the small farmers we met.

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NGO Successes
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14. We met several NGOs working hand-in-hand with WFP
and FAO. NGOs both paralleled and extended the WFP food
pipeline. Ninety-nine percent of FAO's emergency
implementation was done through NGOs. While in
Johannesburg, we spoke with both small and large NGOs
working throughout southern Africa.


15. LDS Charities was a smaller operation and relatively
new in Africa. Much of its work was coordinated closely
with the ecclesiastical authorities of the LDS church.
Recognizing its relative inexperience, the organization
partnered with Catholic Relief Services (CRS),the
Adventists, WFP, and several others. Last year it
provided $11 million of humanitarian assistance in
southeast Africa. In Zimbabwe, LDS Charities had made
available its meetinghouses for distributing WFP food
assistance and to the Red Cross to which it had donated
$3 million for measles vaccinations. It had also used
its meeting places to provide HIV/AIDS education to over
90,000 people in southern Africa.


16. C-Safe, an innovative USAID-funded consortium of
CRS, World Vision, and Care, had pooled successfully the
resources of these three large NGOs into a unitary
coordinated effort with a program value of over $100
million per year. This included 160,000 MT of food
commodity in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. In Malawi, C-
Safe included six additional NGOs. C-Safe's director
told us that they were still testing the consortium
approach. So far, several advantages were apparent: the
size of the organization has placed it in a strong
advocacy position with a block voice, the participating
NGOs were learning from each other, and they found
themselves in a position to work more effectively with
WFP, distributing risks of pipeline failures more
broadly.


17. Accompanied by USDA Under Secretary Eric Bost, we


observed first hand how another the USAID-supported
Humana People-to-People project saturated a community of
about 100,000 people with HIV/AIDS education. In Durban
Deep Township, not far from Soweto, the NGO aimed to
reach every household in the community, and 90 percent of
the people, over the three-year life of the activity.
Working with a highly motivated and well trained cadre of
ward workers (known as "passionates"),Humana ensured
that the individuals were educated about HIV/AIDS. It
also assisted them to develop a strategy to live with the
disease and a belief in a possibly positive future. We
went on house calls and were impressed with the knowledge
that community residents had acquired about the disease.
When Humana is finished, after three years, a team of
motivated local passionates will stay behind to carry on
the work.


18. In South Africa's Northern Province, we also observed
a USAID-sponsored NGO, the Promoting Agricultural
Linkages (PAL) Project, transition traditional farmers
from subsistence to commercial farming. The seminal
activity brought buyers into forward contracts with
selected farmers by guaranteeing a minimum purchase price
for products that meet buyer specifications. The PAL
both made farmers ready for meeting the challenges of
marketing their produce, and lined up major buyers. The
success of the activity, on a micro-level at least, was
evidenced by the eager continuing participation of
farmers that have benefited.


19. Ag MinCouns Wiggin also participated in a meeting
between a white South African commercial farmer
interested in selling his 4,500 ha. game ranch, and a
consortium of black South Africans interested in buying
the property. In a political environment fraught with
uncertainty for white commercial farmers with large
holdings (in part because of Mugabe's activities in
neighboring Zimbabwe, and in part because of persistent
rumors of changing land laws in South Africa) any
amicable example of inter-racial land transactions on a
"willing-buyer-willing-seller" basis was a valuable
demonstration that the market economy for land can work.

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Zimbabwe twinned plague and famine
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20. A visit to Zimbabwe's communal farming areas pointed
out some stark contradictions in the Government's
handling of land tenure. Although these farming areas
were deemed "communal," none of the farmers had title to
his or her land. Farmers could not easily, if at all,
buy and sell or acquire new holdings. While this may be
more or less true in other African countries, the lack of
title was a constraint to the rational use of the
resource, to economies of scale, to land's moving into
the hands of efficient producers, and to investment.
The absence of a land market thus destined the farmers to
remain on small five acre or less plots indefinitely.


21. In the areas of Zimbabwe we visited, we observed a
critical need for continued food assistance for the
country's hunger- and HIV/AIDS-inflicted groups. The
drought may no longer be the factor it once was
considered, and there was a question over whether general
food distribution was any longer needed. However,
targeted assistance, as labor-intensive and relatively
expensive as it may be, is still badly needed by large
numbers of people in Zimbabwe, especially those former
farm workers whom the government dispossessed and re-
located to squatter camps. The sad thing was that, even
with the drought, Zimbabwe's food crisis was one that did
not have to be. Perhaps the ancient Greek writer Hesiod,
in the 7th century BC, said pretty much what was to be
said about today's Zimbabwe when he wrote:
"How often have whole cities had to pay for choosing one
who can but evil do? On them far-seeing Zeus sends
heav'nly woes twinned plague and famine till the
people die."

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Comment
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22. For future generations today's AIDS epidemic may
remain one of the defining events of the late 20th and
early 21st century, much as the plague was in earlier
centuries. One big difference, of course, is that
ignorance of the disease will not be a qualifying defense
for our generation. In southern Africa, where the
epidemic is at its worst, we saw the international
community battling to deal with the epidemic, especially
in producing and making available food in societies, the
e
extent of whose devastation was still only becoming
evident. WFP, FAO, and NGOs were fully engaged in this
struggle.


23. There appeared to be a relatively smooth hand-off
between WFP's immediate food assistance and FAO's
emergency operations, such as seed distribution,
extension advice, conservation agriculture, and treadle-
pump irrigation. We did not observe the next follow-up
phase, FAO's longer-term development activities, but we
did hear criticism that the latter are not as effective
as its emergency projects. In any case, there may be
some anomaly that the USG is not as involved in
supporting emergency operations as it is in other parts
of the pipeline. FAO's emergency projects were actually
where the organization seemed to be at its best, but
where it relied almost entirely on extra-budgetary
contributions. We would recommend that Washington
consider whether we may want to earmark more resources
for this vital stage that, at least in southern Africa,
appears to be launching farmers at least toward full
subsistence production.

CLEVERLEY


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2004ROME01496 - Classification: UNCLASSIFIED