Deserving cases, getting too little help

Jul 27th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Drought and locust plagues have put several million people at risk of starvation in Mali and Niger. Despite months of alerts from aid agencies, neither country is getting all the aid it needs—Mali especially, as a fairly well-run, moderate Muslim country that is keen to help in the “war on terror”, surely deserves a better response from the rich world

A DROUGHT had already scorched the southern edge of the Sahara desert before locusts burst out of the oases around Kidal in Mali last year, settling on cereal crops there and nearby in even more destitute Niger. As a result of a meagre harvest, the cost of millet went up by 30%, sorghum by 50% and maize 60%. In both countries, state and village granaries are low or empty. Som officials in Mali's capital, Bamako, reckon that 4m in the two countries risk starvation, around 1.1m of them in Mali—around 10% of its population. Mortality for under-five-year-olds, already among the highest in the world at over one in five, has risen to record heights.

The damage locusts did to the scrub grasses on which livestock depend has been even more devastating. Hundreds of herdsmen and tens of thousands of cattle have withered and died on futile treks in search of pasture. Survivors in Mali have gathered in unusually large numbers in the Gourma region, east of Timbuktu, raising tensions there and overgrazing land that, but for the Niger river that sweeps slow and brown in a life-giving arc through Mali, would already be desert. Mali's many nomads, already among the poorest in the world, have been particularly hard hit. They used to trade a goat for a sack of millet, which now costs four goats.

The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) and other international aid agencies have been warning for months of an impending disaster across West Africa, especially in Saharan countries like Niger and Mali. If natural disasters were not enough, several countries’ own emergencies are being made worse by huge numbers of refugees flooding in from conflict-torn neighbours such as Sudan and Côte D'Ivoire. However, despite all the grand pledges made by the rich world’s leaders at the Gleneagles summit early this month, only in the past week or so has a moderately encouraging response begun to be seen. Planes bearing food and other urgent supplies have begun touching down in Niger—but reaching all those facing starvation will be a huge struggle, especially now that the rainy season is beginning, making it far harder to reach remote areas.

At the Gleneagles summit, the Group of Eight rich nations pledged to double their overall aid to roughly $100 billion a year by 2010, with about half of that going to Africa. Anti-poverty campaigners professed themselves pleased with this increase, though some claimed that the delay in new funding would cost millions of lives.

Mali’s finance minister, Abou Bakar Traoré, can only shake his head sadly at his country’s state of affairs. Mali is the fourth-poorest state in the world, according to the UN, and getting poorer. Brought in from the private sector and with a clean reputation so far, Mr Traoré does not know what to make of the promises made at the G8 meeting: “I haven't seen anything about debt relief,” he says. “Not a single piece of paper.”

Mali is still paying interest on its debts. Even if they were forgiven, Mr Traoré thinks the benefits would be offset by the high oil price and low price of cotton, Mali’s main export. Transport costs in his landlocked country have already risen by 15%-plus on the back of higher fuel costs; civil war in Côte d'Ivoire, to the south, has further raised costs since it has blocked off the route to Abidjan, the usual port for Malian trade. Road and rail links to Dakar, in Senegal, to the west, are too ropey, so Mali’s truckers face a grinding round trip of 2,000km (1,200 miles) or more through Benin or Togo to get any goods to the world market.

There are some positives. Mali is run better than most other countries in the region. (Niger is less so, as shown by its government’s recent breaking of a promise to abolish slavery.) The European Union, one of Mali’s biggest donors, thinks well of its president, Amadou Toumani Touré. A former general who introduced multi-party democracy in 1992, after seizing power in a coup, and then stayed out of politics for a decade afterwards, he is still fairly popular, since he is apparently more interested in the welfare of his people than in his own wallet. Bamako, sleepy but fairly well run, with little crime and plenty of sewers and street lighting, looks nothing like the capital of one of the world’s most impoverished countries. For all the challenges of isolation, drought and famine, Mali is peaceful and socially cohesive. Marriage across Mali’s tribes is quite common. Except in its desert areas, civil strife is rare.

That may be the country’s strongest, and perhaps only, card. As a moderate Muslim country, Mali could have a useful role in helping to find and close down Islamist terrorist camps in the Sahara. Its army is playing its part in a Pentagon Trans-Sahara plan, to be funded with $500m over seven years, to train thousands of African commandos for desert and border operations and to link forces in various countries with secure satellite communications. Algeria, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Nigeria, Morocco and Tunisia are also involved, with Libya perhaps to be added if its relations with the United States improve. Mali hopes that helping to catch terrorists might shame America’s administration into slashing the subsidies of $3 billion or so it gives its own cotton growers (many of them Texan) and which help keeps Mali (and Niger) so poor.

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