New York Times July 13, 2003
Why People Still Starve
July 13, 2003
By BARRY BEARAK
Late one afternoon, during the long melancholia of the
hungry months, there was a burst of joyous delirium in
Mkulumimba. Children began shouting the word ngumbi,
announcing that winged termites were fluttering through the
fields. These were not the bigger species of the insect,
which can be fried in oil and sold as a delicacy for a good
price. Instead, these were the smaller ones, far more wing
than torso, which are eaten right away. Suddenly, most
everyone was giddily chasing about; villagers were catching
ngumbi with their fingers and tossing them onto their
tongues, grateful for the unexpected gift of food afloat in
the air.
Adilesi Faisoni was able to share in that happiness but not
in the cavorting. For several years, old age had been
catching up with her, until it had finally pulled even and
then ahead. Her walk was unsteady now, her posture stooped,
her eyesight dimmed. As the others ran about, she remained
seated on the wet ground near the doorstep of her mud-brick
hovel. It was the same place I always found her during my
weeks in the villages of Malawi, weeks when I was examining
the mechanisms of famine. ''There is no way to get used to
hunger,'' Adilesi told me once. ''All the time something is
moving in your stomach. You feel the emptiness. You feel
your intestines moving. They are too empty, and they are
searching for something to fill up on.''
Hunger was the main topic of our talks. Most every year,
Malawi suffers a food shortage during the so-called hungry
months, December through March, the single growing season
in a predominantly rural nation. Corn is this country's
mainstay, what people mainly grow and what people mainly
eat, usually as nsima, a thick porridge. Ideally, the yield
from one harvest lasts until the next. But even in good
times the food supply is nearing its end while the next
crop is still rising from the ground. Families often endure
this hungry period on a single meal a day, sometimes
nothing more than a foraged handful of greens. Last year's
food crisis was the worst in living memory. Hundreds, and
probably thousands, of Malawians succumbed to the scythe of
a hunger-related death.
Among those who perished were Adilesi's husband, Robert
Mkulumimba, and their grown daughter Mdati Robert, herself
the mother of four young sons. The two died within a month
of each other, unable to subsist on the pumpkin leaves and
wild vegetables that had become the family's only
nourishment. ''The first symptom was the swollen feet, and
then the swelling started to move up his body,'' Adilesi
said of her husband's illness.
It was strange the way Robert seemed to fade. Before the
start of the hungry months, it had been he who had kept the
family going, leaving before dawn each day to sell firewood
or tend someone's fields. But then work became impossibly
scarce, and Robert seemed to be using himself up in the
search for it. ''At the peak of the crisis, there was
nothing to do but beg, and you were begging from others who
needed to beg.''
As most people visualize it, famine is a doleful spectacle,
the aftershock of some calamity that has left thousands of
the starving flocked together, emergency food kept from
their mouths by the perils of war or the callousness of
despots or the impassibility of washed-away roads. But more
often, in the nether regions of the developing world,
famine is both less obvious and more complicated. Even
small jolts to the regular food supply can jar open the
trapdoor between what is normal, which is chronic
malnutrition, and what is exceptional, which is outright
starvation. Hunger and disease then malignly feed off each
other, leaving the invisible poor to die in invisible
numbers.
Nowhere is this truer than in sub-Saharan Africa, where
President Bush was recently scheduled to travel. Each year,
most nations in the region grow poorer, hungrier and
sicker. Their share of global trade and investment has been
collapsing. Average per capita income is lower now than in
the 1960's, with half the population surviving on less than
65 cents a day. It is a situation seldom noticed, as wars
on poverty are neglected for wars more animate. African
countries now hold the 27 lowest places on the
human-development index -- a combined measure of health,
literacy and income calculated by the United Nations. They
occupy 38 spots in the bottom 50.
During the past decade or so, the poorest of Africa's poor
have suffered as rarely before. Merely to survive, they
have sold off their meager assets -- household goods and
farm animals and the tin roofs of their homes. Just now,
the most urgent need is in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Zimbabwe.
But hunger has become a chronic problem throughout the
region, often occurring even under the best of weather
conditions. The World Food Program warns that nearly 40
million Africans are struggling against starvation, a
''scale of suffering'' that is ''unprecedented.''
Coincident with the hunger is H.I.V./AIDS, which has beset
sub-Saharan Africa in a disproportionate way, cursing it
with 29.4 million infections, nearly three-quarters of the
world's caseload. Very few of the stricken can afford the
drugs that forestall the virus's death work, and family
after family is being purged of its breadwinning
generations, leaving the very young and the very old to
cope.
With survival so precarious, life is lived at the edge of
nothingness, easily pushed over the side. Take Malawi, I
was told again and again -- for this land-locked,
overpopulated nation in southeastern Africa seems to be a
favored specimen of researchers. There is a relative
innocence to Malawi's impoverishment: no tyrannical
dictator currently in power, no army of goons marauding in
civil war, no disastrous weather wiping out the harvest.
And yet last year, the nation was nudged into starvation.
It happened while there was grain in the stores, if only
the poor had the money to buy it. It happened while
well-meaning people were arguing about whether it was
happening at all.
To track the origins of the crisis, my plan was this: to
find a family that had lost someone to last year's hunger
and then work my way back through the hows and whys. Though
I mostly shuttled over the narrow and soggy mud roads
between Mkulumimba, Adilesi's village, and Lilongwe, the
capital, the actual route of causality reaches beyond
Malawi's borders. It extends toward wealthier nations and
their shared institutions -- the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. It travels the uncertain ups
and downs of global commodity prices and currency
valuations -- and of course passes into the limited access
roads of humanity's conscience.
"The new generation are the unfortunates, because now there
is a food shortage every year,'' Adilesi said. ''Things
began getting bad when I was done with my childbearing
years. If they had been this bad before, all my children
would have died.''
In a Malawian village, guests are customarily greeted
outside and offered a mat as a seat. Adilesi's front door
faced a broad clearing that slanted down, allowing a
splendid view of cornfields and acacias and the Dzalanyama
Mountains in the distance. About 20 yards to the left was a
banana tree and the ruins of an outhouse, its mud walls
half-collapsed by a recent storm. The main house itself was
a single room, about 9 feet by 12 feet, with a roof of
bundled grass. In one corner were the ashy remnants of a
small fire. Otherwise, the room was empty but for a tin
pail, two pots, a few baskets and plastic bowls and some
empty grain sacks that could be used as blankets. Adilesi
lived in this hut with her daughter Lufinenti and 10
grandchildren. It was hard to imagine the geometry that
would allow them all to sleep in so spare a space.
''We squeeze like worms,'' Adilesi said, explaining rather
than complaining.
Thin-faced and withered, the old woman owned only one set
of clothes, a colorful wrap that went around her waist and
a faded T-shirt that showed a San Francisco street scene
and advertised Levi's 501 jeans. The lettering proclaimed,
''Quality Never Goes Out of Style.'' She had no idea what
the words meant. ''Is this something offensive?'' she asked
in Chichewa, Malawi's main language, bending her head down
so she could examine the thinned cloth. The villagers all
bought such used clothing, the discards of people from
richer nations. Children who had never seen television
unwittingly sported apparel that allied them with Ninja
Turtles and Power Rangers. Often, holes in these shirts
rivaled the size of the remaining garment. This shamed the
children, and some refused to go to school. ''I have no
idea what San Francisco is,'' Adilesi said with a smile,
repeating the words she had just been told. ''I couldn't
tell you whether it's an animal or a man.''
She did not know her age, either, but she could remember
the historic famine of 1949. She was a youngster then, that
year when the skies cruelly withheld the rains. The
undisturbed sun not only parched the cornstalks; it seemed
to melt the glue that held the village together. Neighbors,
once generous, hid away what food they had, afraid of
theft. Women sang prayers of apology to their ancestors for
any conceivable wrongdoing and begged them to reopen the
clouds. Men wandered far from their homes, disappearing for
weeks in a desperate search for work. ''We refer to it
simply as '49,'' Adilesi said.
She married Robert soon after. She can't recall exactly
when. Robert was a nephew of the village chief, and their
wedding was preceded by an evening of dancing, with the
entire village sharing in a feast of two goats, several
chickens and homemade beer. Vows were recited at the
African Abraham Church nearby. Adilesi would later bear 12
children, including 8 who lived to be adults -- an average
rate of survival in a country where half the children
suffer stunted growth and one in four die before age 5.
Robert, tall and stout, was a good provider. As a young
man, he went to South Africa and toiled in the mines. Then,
back in Malawi, he worked for the forestry department,
slashing away underbrush with his panga knife. In a village
of farmers, he was one of the few men who carried home
monthly paychecks. But that job ended four years ago, when
the government, under pressure from foreign lenders,
drastically reduced its payroll. Robert then spent more
time farming and doing ganyu, day labor.
Toward the end of 2001, after an overabundance of rain and
a disappointing harvest, corn prices leapt as high as 40
kwacha per kilo, about 50 cents, a forbidding sum for
people used to paying a tenth as much. Foraging became
necessary, as it had been in '49, as it was last year, as
it is even now. The toil was not unproductive. In the
openness of the plain, with the daily rain slapping hard at
the mud, edible leaves reached out for the taking from
small stems. They held vitamin C, some iron, some beta
carotene. Occasionally there were tubers. People could eat,
just not a balanced diet, just not enough.
Hunger, like many diseases, is often an abettor of death
rather than an absolute cause. Who really knew: was it the
tuberculosis or the malnutrition that came first, and which
of them delivered the fatal blow? But symptomatically,
starvation usually arrives with anemia and extreme wasting
and swelling from fluid in the tissue. There can be loss of
appetite, and there can be diarrhea. Robert suffered all
these symptoms. That a grown man would be among those to
succumb to the hunger was not so uncommon. Men, it was
explained to me, used up more of themselves in the
unceasing search for ganyu.
Whatever the undertow, Robert grew too weak to work. He and
Adilesi went to the government hospital, where he was
treated for malnutrition, then later treated for malaria,
then sent home. When they released him, the doctors said he
needed to eat better or he would die. Inevitably, there was
little food, so he began his capitulation, imparting final
goodbyes. ''He told me we needed to remain united as a
family,'' said Kiniel, 16, the youngest of his children.
Robert's daughter Mdati fell ill soon after he went into
his decline. She was about 30. Her husband had been a
philanderer to whom she had said good riddance, and now she
was suddenly incapable of caring for their four sons
herself. The entire family had always depended on her.
Mdati was the only one who could read and write. ''She went
to school up to the second grade,'' said her sister
Lufinenti. ''She was very smart.''
Unlike her father, Mdati couldn't keep food down when she
found something to eat. This raised a suspicion that she
had somehow been bewitched.
The family regularly attended the African Abraham Church, a
tiny red-brick building with pews and an altar molded out
of mud. As with most Christians in the area, they found
ways to blend witchcraft into their beliefs. ''Some people
protect their fields with charms, but we can't afford such
things,'' Adilesi told me. This safeguard against thievery
required the intercession of someone with magical powers, a
sing'anga. (My interpreter -- the daily intermediary
between my English and the villagers' Chichewa -- used the
word ''witch doctor,'' though a more respectful term would
be ''traditional healer.'') The family had great hopes that
a sing'anga could break the spell that gripped Mdati. They
took her to two of them.
The first, Bomba Kamchewere, is a tall, bony man with a
missing front tooth. When I visited him, he spread out a
mat of tightly stitched reeds so we could sit together
beneath his favorite tree. He had been tutored, in dreams,
by Jesus himself, he said. But even with divine insight
into the curative uses of roots and herbs, his powers had
limits. While he claimed to cure stomachaches, venereal
disease and tuberculosis, he confessed that other
sicknesses baffled him. AIDS was particularly confounding,
as was njala, or hunger, which had been Mdati's problem.
''With her case, the spirits told me I could not do
anything,'' he said. Then, somewhat shamefully, he
confessed that around that time he himself had endured
njala, quite frighteningly so. ''I went three weeks without
any solid food, and I developed some strange swelling.'' At
a hospital, the doctors recommended that he eat more, which
was advice that struck the sing'anga as less than a
revelation.
Mose Chinkhombe, a young, self-confident man with a
spacious smile, was the second healer. His home was hours
away in the village of Chiseka. To get there, the starving
Mdati, limp as a rag doll, had to be placed on a borrowed
bicycle and guided over the roads by five companions, who
took turns keeping both her and the wheels steady.
A year later, the healer still remembered her. ''My
diagnosis was anemia,'' he said as he sat in a dark room on
a half-sack of dried lime, all the while shooing flies with
an oxtail. He was in his vocational attire, a spotless
white frock and floppy hat. ''She was so weak from lack of
food,'' the healer said. ''I could treat her for this
anemia. But I told her she needed to eat enough food to
recharge her body. When she left, she had improved
slightly. But then I heard she died.'' He nodded rather
forcefully as he said this. Then, perhaps in defense of his
medical craft, he apparently felt he needed to tell me the
obvious, that the ''big hunger'' had taken a great many
lives during those dismal months.
There is a belief that when a stray black dog crosses your
path, terrible times will come, he said. ''Last year,'' he
explained, ''a black dog walked across the entire
country.''
Some 11 million people live in Malawi, though far too few
live especially long. Average life expectancy from birth