or do we continue to crucify him?
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EthiopiaSomaliaZimbabweSudanKenya"East Africa: Pastoralist Crisis Will Not Be Solved With Food Aid - UN Officials"Zambia (article is NYtimes select)
Zambia's Plight Goes Begging in Year of Disasters
by MICHAEL WINES. Published: February 23, 2006
NANGWESHI REFUGEE CAMP, Zambia - Hundreds of refugees from Angola's civilwar have walked away from this remote United Nations outpost where most havelived for years, many roaming on foot as far as the Namibia border, 85 milesaway. The journey was not by choice. The refugees were looking for food.
In January, to stretch its thinning supplies, the United Nations cut itsalready basic food rations to war refugees in Zambia by almost 40 percent --not just for the Nangweshi camp's 15,100 residents, but also for 57,000refugees from Congo in four other camps.
The cuts were made after the developed world did not respond to UnitedNations' pleas for help to feed the refugees. Like similar appeals, theywent unheeded in a year of many disasters and what aid specialists call agrowing malaise among donors about such emergencies.
That thousands of war refugees cared for by the United Nations should gohungry for want of about $8.5 million, what amounts to a rounding error inthe budgets of wealthy countries, may seem surprising. But the international system that is supposed to protect refugees from hunger and privation isprone to breakdowns like this one, which has rendered 72,000 war victims inZambia hungry for weeks on end.
The food reductions in the camps prevented the United Nations' World Food Program from running out of rations. But even a brief visit to Nangweshi, agrid of wide dirt roads and thousands of mud huts beside the Zambezi River, makes the cost of the move painfully evident. Only a month after rationswere reduced, refugees have left to seek food and money to feed their families. Malnutrition among the camp's remaining children has risen by more than one third.
One Nangweshi family of 10, its monthly ration exhausted, weathered January's final days by eating leaves plucked from plants growing outside its hut. Other families resorted to begging in villages outside the camp, but the drought last year left local residents so bereft that food or money for needy refugees is scarce. ''It's a matter of priorities for the international community,'' David Stevenson, the Canadian who leads the WorldFood Program's Zambia operations, said in an interview in Lusaka, the capital. ''What could be more obvious than refugee camps?''
Mr. Stevenson said that lapses in international food aid to refugees hadbeen a recurring problem in Rwanda, and that after the earthquake inPakistan last October the World Food Program came within hours of groundingits food airlifts because it was out of cash.
Lapses in aid are often temporary. In February, nearly four months after the World Food Program first sought emergency aid for Zambia's refugees, theUnited States, Britain and Germany made pledges totaling $2.3 million towardthe $8.5 million shortfall. The infusion will eventually allow the programto restore many, though not all, of the cuts made on Jan. 1.Even temporary shortfalls, however, have consequences. The same Zambiancamps that suffered ration cuts in January ran short of food in late 2004,officials here say. At that time, some of the women in the camps turned to prostitution to feed their children.
Meager Rations Are Cut
Few would call the monthly stipend given to most African refugees overly generous. Before the reductions in January, a Nangweshi resident's average meal consisted of 4.7 ounces of nutrient-fortified ground corn, 2 ounces of beans, half an ounce of vegetable oil and a pinch of salt. Three servings a day provided 2,207 calories, the minimum the World Food Program recommends for adequate nutrition among Zambian refugees.Then in January, the diet was pared to 1,400 calories -- the equivalent, roughly, of subsisting each day on one Big Mac, large fries, ketchup and a Coke. Most of Nangweshi's 4,100 families reacted predictably to the cuts. To stretch out their rations, they moved to two meals a day from three, eliminating breakfast. But it was still not enough. In family after family, January's rations were exhausted a week or more before the February food delivery was due. In the camp's medical clinic, a chalkboard tallied the fallout from the cuts: moderate malnutrition was diagnosed in 106 children in January, up from 69 in December; 2 other children had acute malnutrition, compared with none earlier. The clinic recorded a similar jump in late 2004, the last time rations were reduced. Outside, amid the camp's stick-and-mud-walled, thatched huts, virtually every family had a story about hunger. Even before the cuts, ''what we normally receive was not enough,'' said Gabriel Vunonge, the 62-year-old, one-legged patriarch of a refugee family of 13. The reduced ration, he said, ''won't reach.''Virtually all Angolan war refugees have returned home under a United Nations repatriation program. The remainder, all in Nangweshi, are mostly former rebel supporters and guerillas like Mr. Vunonge who fear retribution and are awaiting the outcome of Angolan elections this year before deciding whether to return. In the Vunonge family, the January rations ran out a week before the February distribution was to began. So, Mr. Vunonge took his crutches and, with his wife, hobbled several miles outside the refugee camp to look for work. Three days of weeding a farmer's cornfield -- Mr. Vunonge working with one hand on his crutch, the other on a hoe -- bought the couple 26 pounds of wheat. That fed the family until February rations arrived. Many men ranged much farther afield. In January, the United Nations issued 176 passes for Nangweshi residents to leave the camp. Most walked to Sesheke, a town 85 miles away where a sawmill has long attracted job-seeking refugees. Many more refugees left without passes. In January, for the first time, Sesheke officials arrested 10 newly arrived illegal refugees in the town.''There are still a great many refugees in the area, and the worry at the moment is food allocation,'' said Princess Nakatindi Wina, who represents Sesheke in the Zambian Parliament. ''We hope the government will get a move on and repatriate them soon, back to Angola and Congo, to where they came from.''
Vital Aid Is Left to Chance
Why shortfalls of aid to refugees and other equally vulnerable groups occur at all is vexing. The system that funnels food to the world's needy rests almost wholly on the generosity of the well-off, and each donor's impulse is subject to different forces.''The system is basically a crapshoot,'' Larry Minear, who leads Tufts University's Institute on Humanitarianism and War, said. Fluctuations in food prices, the size of crop surpluses in donating nations, politics in donor and recipient nations, and the inefficiencies of the global aid bureaucracy can all play a role in what aid specialists euphemistically call ''pipeline breaks.''Food shortages have become so regular in parts of Africa that some governments consider them normal, rather than emergencies -- an attitude many aid officials say was at the root of the sluggish response last year to widespread hunger in Niger.Often, as in Niger, money comes only belatedly, after wealthy donors have been harangued by the United Nations or embarrassed by news media coverage of hungry masses.
That is the crux of the problem, many aid specialists say. Support for global emergencies is purely voluntary, forcing humanitarian agencies to gohat in hand to governments, not just to sustain continuing programs likerefugee camps, but for new emergencies like the 2004 tsunami.
''We are professional beggars,'' said one Europe-based United Nationsofficial on condition of anonymity for fear of angering donor nations. Headded: ''Some activities, you can decide whether you want to voluntarilyfund or not. But things like Darfur, like refugees -- for that sort ofthing, we should have a system that produces money faster.''
