While drought conditions are international, reaching well beyond the continent into parts of Asia, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, the severe dry spell’s impact on Africa is especially acute, given the brutal legacy and present-day reality of colonial and imperialist exploitation.

In sub-Saharan Africa, considered the poorest region on earth, the drought has caused many crops to fail, while livestock have starved to death because of a lack of water and pasture. The resulting food shortage is the worst in nearly 60 years.

"In the last five seasons we did not sell anything because we did not have rain," Stephen Waithaka, a Kenyan corn farmer, told reporters in early September. "We still had enough for ourselves," he added. "I fear others did not."

Officials from the UN World Food Program say that hundreds of thousands of metric tons of cornmeal and foodstuffs are needed to feed the region. More than 14 million people are facing famine in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, say UN researchers.

In Malawi the number of cases of severe malnutrition identified in local clinics has soared by 80 percent in the course of the drought.

In February officials from the European Union reported that many Africans had gone without food for a week or more. Some authorities in the region put the figure of those suffering from hunger and malnutrition at 20 million.

Working people have told reporters of the impact on their living standards from price-gouging by food merchants. In Zambia, for example, the price of corn has been driven up by 300 percent. Tipilire Kasingiro of Zambia said she cannot afford what food is available. To ease hunger pangs she and her neighbors have dug up the roots of a banana tree and pounded them into a porridge for a meal, aware that it would make them ill. "We were desperate, and we knew it would fill our bellies, if only temporarily," she explained.

"I have never seen such starvation," said Lucas Lufuzi, an old farmer in Malawi. "I had no choice but to harvest the crops before they were ready." That harvest, he added, "is all that keeps us from death."

The famine conditions confronting toilers in Africa flow from the imperialist-imposed backwardness in agriculture and industry. Most farmers in Africa lack access to technology and modern irrigation methods needed to battle against drought, crop disease, weeds, and pests.  
 
Unequal use of electricity
With nearly 10 percent of the world’s population, the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa consume only 1 percent of the world’s electricity. Since 1995 commercial energy use and electric power consumption have actually dropped across the region. The imperialist countries in North America, Europe, and Japan, home to a mere 14 percent of the world’s population, use almost 60 percent of the world’s electricity.

The total debt of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa owed to imperialist banks, lending agencies, and governments amounts to $170 billion, more than half their yearly gross domestic product.

The continent has an abundance of minerals such as copper, diamonds, silver, gold, and petroleum. It is one of the world’s largest sources of cobalt, uranium, iron, and bauxite.

Africa’s wealth in natural resources, including a vast amount of land suitable for agriculture, stands in stark contrast to the immense poverty of its people. Nearly half the population lives on less than $1 a day. Of the 49 least developed countries in the world, 37, or 75 percent of the total, are in Africa. Below the Sahara, average income is lower today than in 1970.

The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute last year predicted that if the situation remains the same or gets worse, the number of malnourished children in Africa could rise to nearly 49 million--one in every two. By contrast, the agency reported a drop in the global malnutrition rate among children under 5 from 45 percent in the 1960s to 31 percent in 2001.

Under such conditions life expectancy for Africans is falling. In Zambia it has dropped from 50 in the late 1980s to 37 today. Without adequate nutrition thousands die from malaria and cholera and other diseases that they might have otherwise survived.

Added to the impact of chronic hunger, the AIDS pandemic is decimating the population. Last year some 2.2 million Africans died of the disease. Of the estimated 40 million people worldwide who are infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS, more than 70 percent, or 28.5 million, live in Africa.

A UN-sponsored food conference held in Spain this summer noted that AIDS has exacerbated Africa’s food crisis by killing farmers in some of the world’s most famished areas. Over the past 20 years some 7 million farmers in Africa have died of AIDS, reducing labor productivity by up to 50 percent.  
 
Washington’s protectionist weapons
Africa’s impoverished conditions are reinforced and perpetuated by the trade policies of Washington and the European imperialist powers, which slap protectionist measures on key imports, blocking African commodities from the market. This is one factor in the drastic decline in Sub-Saharan Africa’s share of world trade, which has dropped to 1.3 percent, about a third of what it was 20 years ago. According to the World Bank, since 1970 African countries have lost half their share of world markets.

While Washington has eliminated some tariffs on African exports, presenting such steps as a boost to the continent’s economic development, many restrictions remain in place. These include the requirement that a range of commodities produced in Africa, including textiles, must contain raw material imported from the United States to qualify for entry into the U.S. market.

The governments in imperialist countries allocate $350 billion annually for domestic agricultural subsidies, which disproportionately go to capitalist farmers. These policies are estimated to cost semicolonial countries at least $50 billion a year in lost agricultural exports.

Added to the higher yields and lower costs of production of U.S. agriculture, such protectionist moves have a devastating impact on African competitiveness.

Ghana is one example. Through the International Monetary Fund Washington insisted that the Ghanaian government eliminate subsidies on its rice crop, at the same time as it increased subsidies for U.S. farmers. Vendors in that country, once a rice exporter, now mainly sell rice imported from the United States. Unable to compete with cheaper U.S. imports, rice-growing areas have been devastated.

The recent U.S. farm bill spells "more doom for us," said Bishop Akogolo, executive director of a social agency in Accra, Ghana’s capital. "You keep your subsidies and we’ll keep our subsidies and barriers," he told a New York Times reporter.
 
 
Related article:
Drought: not a ‘natural’ disaster  
 
 
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