Political capital deficits in Zimbabwean famine: national and international responsibility for prevention failure.

• Author: McClelland, Cary
• Position: ANDREW WELLINGTON CORDIER ESSAY

After a long and bitter civil war, on the eve of independence in 1980, Zimbabwe's future seemed promising. Robert Mugabe, the former leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), assumed the office of prime minister, inheriting an exceedingly productive country, rich in resources and armed with a well-established infrastructure that included a powerful bureaucracy, particularly within the commercial agriculture sector. Citizens around the world listened eagerly to Mugabe's inaugural address keen to discern the country's path. To the surprise of many--even his most vocal critics--Mugabe appeared a calm and unifying leader. His vision set out a period of reconciliation and stability for a country desperate for development and respite from conflict. (1)

Had Mugabe's vision become a reality, Zimbabwe would have indeed become a model for stable and sustained post-colonial development. Today, however, Mugabe's Zimbabwe threatens to become one of southern Africa's great burdens. Since 1999, the country has suffered from long periods of food shortage, the effects of which are exacerbated by internal conflict and political instability. (2) Zimbabweans survive only on large donations of food aid, and 40 percent of the population currently suffers from some kind of undernourishment. Hyperinflation--this year estimated as high as 613 percent--aggravates an already alarming situation and current political tensions are so high that some experts believe that there is significant risk of a future rebellion. (3) As a result, Zimbabweans increasingly have been fleeing to the country's more stable neighbors, Botswana and South Africa, among others. Such massive emigration now threatens regional stability.

Eager to identify the root causes of the country's humanitarian crisis and cauterize Zimbabwe's seemingly endless hemorrhage, development analysts and relief experts the world over have been drawn to the nation's plight. (4) Analysts are usually divided into two primary camps: those who highlight drought as the central cause of food production shocks, and those who propose a more complex mapping in which current social, economic and health factors conflate to undermine the agricultural sector. (5) While the first camp's emphasis on drought addresses the trigger of the crisis, the second camp's integrated model diagnoses the proximate causes. Unfortunately, each of these analyses focuses on the famine as the definitive challenge confronting Zimbabwe, when this disaster in and of itself is not the country's true emergency. Rather, the famine is a symptom of political and historical inequalities--both domestic and international--that have remained largely unchecked over time.

Without question, the country's famine is important to address, but more important to remedy are the nation's deep-rooted political and social conflicts. Sadly, to the country's detriment, the international aid community has remained overly focused on short-term relief efforts directed towards alleviating the food shortage, in effect, the aid community's approach has failed to establish any sustainable means of mitigating future crises, a consistent pattern found in developing countries the world over. Zimbabwe may serve as an important study on the basis of which the international aid community can seek new paradigms to understand the role of political reconciliation and government capacity building in the design of crisis prevention and mitigation strategies for emerging democracies.

POINT OF ORIGIN: THE JEWEL OF AFRICA

Perhaps the key to Zimbabwe's early prosperity was the strength of its agricultural sector. Zimbabwe's advancements in agricultural technology under British rule were unrivaled in the region. On the eve of independence, commercial agriculture was the country's dominant industry, accounting for approximately 25 percent of formal employment and 40 percent of the country's foreign exchange earnings; almost 40 percent of Zimbabwe's maize grew on commercial farms. (6) Further, during the 1980s, Zimbabwe's land remained underutilized, demonstrating that the country was operating at a surplus without reaching its maximum potential. (7) In effect, such tremendous agricultural productive capacity should have rendered Zimbabwe virtually invulnerable to famine, international market variations and competitive trade shocks.

The Zimbabwean government also inherited strong protective measures against food shortages from their Rhodesian predecessors. Indeed, even today the Zimbabwean countryside remains dotted with large grain silos. During Mugabe's early years, these silos constituted the country's strategic grain reserve, a stockpile of purported more than three times the annual food supply needs. Only recently did the nation's fecundity diminish:

Until 2000, the country regularly produced surplus grain for export ... At this time the World Food Program's only operation in Zimbabwe was a procurement office from where it purchased Zimbabwean grain for food aid programs elsewhere in Africa. (8) Given such food stocks, at any time the private sector failed the government should have been able to step in and temporarily defray short-term losses. In the 1980s few aid practitioners working in Zimbabwe would have predicted the country's fall into famine. (9) Despite this early agricultural stability, extreme food shortages began in 1999 and have continued unabated. Currently, 60 to 80 percent of the population is dependent on small-scale and subsistence agriculture. As such, the country's food supply is much more vulnerable to drought-related famine than in the days of commercial farming prevalence. (10) In 2004, the famine was so widespread that more than 5 million of Zimbabwe's 12.5 million people experienced food insecurity, representing 64 percent of the rural population. (11) At present, Zimbabwe's "agriculture is largely rain-fed with only 6 percent of arable land under irrigation ... [meaning] the effects of drought are direct and large." (12) This disastrous situation demonstrates how little of the protective infrastructure existing at independence remains in place today

A POSSIBLE TRIGGER: THE QUESTION OF DROUGHT

The visibility of Zimbabwe's famine problems has led some analysts to focus on drought as the primary trigger. (13) Much of this emphasis on climate may hold true for the region at large, as climate variations have played a significant role in triggering food insecurity in southern Africa. (14) Zimbabwe's history, however, diminishes the usefulness of such generalizations.

Many scientists consider the correlation between climate and food production a key to anticipating famine relief. (15) The International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI) in particular focuses its attention on climate change as a way of developing early warning indicators to help plan preventative interventions to stave off potential crises. (16) The organization notes: "The continent of Africa is warmer than it was 100 years ago. Warming [throughout] the 20th century has been at the rate of about 0.5[degrees] Celsius per century. The six warmest years in Africa have all occurred since 1987, with 1998 being the warmest year." (17)

This general climatic trend is no less true for Zimbabwe. IRI analyzed the region's precipitation for the past thirty years, and Zimbabwe has received on average 200 millimeters less rain annually than expected. (18) Since 2000, Zimbabwe faced a series of extreme weather events that affected its farming output. (19) In 2001, floods in eastern Zimbabwe caused by Cyclone Eileen devastated 63,000 hectares of crops. Thereafter, the regional drought in 2002 exposed an already vulnerable community to starvation: "Zimbabwe was hit by an erratic rainfall pattern during [the] 2002/2003 cereal growing season, following on the heels of a severe drought and the collapse of cereal production the previous year." (20) These specific events played an important role in sparking Zimbabwe's current crisis and destabilizing the agricultural sector.

Nevertheless, when these events are compared to similar events in Zimbabwe's recent past, it becomes clear that the country has not always proven so vulnerable to drought. In 1992, all of southern Africa endured diminished food supplies due to a "global El Nino effect which triggered widespread drought conditions. However, even these sizeable reductions in regional food production did not lead to famine." (21) In other words, in 1992, Zimbabwe suffered comparatively minor losses in food production from a much more radical climate shock than the one faced at the turn of the millennium. Comparing this situation with the weaker climate incidents from 2000 to 2002, the effect of a relatively marginal drought on the country's food supply today should be equivalently marginal. In fact, though, the rains have returned and Zimbabwe's crisis continues unabated. (22) If the country's food shortage were merely climate dependent, then the situation would reverse itself.

Drought has been central to the national and international rhetoric and action regarding Zimbabwe's situation. Despite the seriousness of the crisis, the cries of famine from Zimbabwean government officials are frequently exaggerated to protect the government from external and internal criticism. The IRI notes that often "the occurrence of periodic drought [in Zimbabwe] was almost welcomed by mid-level government administrators." (23) On the other hand, cultural habits and concerns within the international aid community make it "highly reactive and relief oriented, and extremely dependent on outside initiative and financial support." (24) As a result, the suddenness of so-called natural disasters has a way of capturing international attention and galvanizing donor support. In effect, drought has become a useful excuse for policymakers both inside and outside Zimbabwe to evade responsibility for failed disaster mitigation mechanisms.

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