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Trail of freak weather across world
Famine outbreaks add
up to global disaster
From VICTORIA BRITTAIN, in London
FREAK weather has brought
unprecedented drought and
flooding to more than 40 coun
tries in Latin America, Asia
and Africa and now presents
international aid agencies with
an unrecognised worldwide dis
aster.
The British charity Oxfam,
which claims a unique network of
information from its village-based
aid projects all over the Third
World, has launched an urgent
appeal for a long-term macro
economic plan to prevent the col
lapse of agriculture across a wide
swathe of the world from Peru
through Africa and Asia to the
Philippines.
"The structure and fabric of
society will erode on these conti
nents," says Mr Guy Stringer, Ox
fam's deputy director-general.
Oxfam and other international
aid agencies are faced with more
requests for emergency aid than
ever before. So heavy are the de
mands that Oxfam has exhausted
its budget for this year in just three
months and is having to appeal for
more money.
Abnormal weather factors such
as the warm Pacific current known
as El Nino have caused storms and
floods in Latin America and
Europe. But weather experts do not
know yet whether this extra-warm
current, the record heatwaves in
America and Europe and the
droughts in Asia and Africa were
freak coincidences or the start of
an ominous new pattern of world
weather.
But even on the most optimistic
assumption that the past year's
pattern will not be repeated, aid
officials forecast at least five years
of exceptional assistance needed on
all three continents. Oxfam staff
took a long time to work out the
relationship between the numerous
fragments of information about
drought and lood that have come
to light in so many different areas
recently, according to Mr Michael
Harris, their overseas director.
Mr Harris is just back from a
sobering tour of Latin America
where he described an Andean
town in which the only place to
sleep was on the roofs of houses.
"Every house is flooded and
filled with slime," he said. "There
is no fresh water or sanitation."
In Peru, Bolivia, India and
Africa, drought has so reduced
agricultural yields in the last year
that millions of tons of seed grain
and seed potatoes have been eaten,
making the prospect for next year
even more catastrophic.
Inevitably the traditional re
sponse of flight from rural hard
ship to the cities is speeding up,
and never have the cities of the
Third World had less to offer.
The pattern of declining exports
and less imports of oil, raw
materials and spare parts have set
a downward spiral in motion of less
jobs and less to eat. The recent
stealing from supermarkets by
hungry crowds in Brazil may be
only a foretaste of what is in store
for the slums of Lagos and Nairobi
to Bangkok and Manila.
The Oxfam warning follows re
cent reports from the Food and
Agricultural Organisation on im
pending famine in Africa and from
the World Council of Churches
and Church World Service which
arc equally frightening. But, as the
aid officials themselves admit, the
knowledge about impending
ecological and agricultural dis
aster, with all its implications for
social collapse, has been in numer
ous United Nations agencies and
non-governmental organisations
for years.
Co-ordination between these
agencies on a country-by-country
basis has slightly improved with
some of the big disaster relief pro
grams in recent years, but the
international bureaucracy has so
far proved incapablc of co-ordina
tion.
An unrelated report from the
World Health Organisation under
lines Oxfam's appeal for govern
ments to summon the political will
to attack major world problems
which have been diagnosed only
too often.
The WHO report says that 12
million children die each year
before their first birthday, almost
all from simple curable diseases.
One fifteenth of global military
spending, S5.750 million, or S14.50
per head would save the lives of
virtually all those children if it was
spent on modest primary health
care, WHO says.
- The Guardian |
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