Famine takes root when farmers lose their means of production. In Africa, drought and war have forced huge numbers of peasants to sell off their animals and tools and abandon the land on which they depend, thus bringing local economies to a standstill. Grain yields in Africa declined by one-third per hectare over the last decade; food production is down by 15 percent since 1981. One out of every five Africans now depends on food aid. Interest payments on international loans now consume $15 billion per year. The continent’s industrial base is functioning at only one-third of capacity. The incidence of famine among Africa’s rural producers has in turn brought national economies to a halt.
A decade ago, the Horn of Africa was the scene of one of the most spectacular geopolitical realignments in Cold War history. A devastating famine helped trigger the ouster of Ethiopia’s strongly pro-US emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. A military junta seized power in Addis Ababa and pledged to place the strife-torn empire on the road to “socialism.” Three years later, the US and the Soviet Union switched positions in Ethiopia and Somalia and the entire region rippled with the aftershocks.
As Egypt’s dependence on food imports has increased, so has the cry for food security. The phrase “food security” (al-amn al-geza’i) can have several meanings in Egyptian policy debates. It is usually taken to mean either “hedging against fluctuations in world food prices” or “increasing domestic production of food crops.” The Ministry of Agriculture has recently been renamed Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security.
“I went down to Cairo with a little wheat in my pocket and they had the red carpet out for me there…. I was speaking the language of food and they understand.” — US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, 1974
For more than a decade now, the political embrace of Washington and Cairo has directly affected what Egypt’s 45 million people eat and how much they pay for it. Once a leading granary for the entire Mediterranean, Egypt today is one of the largest food importers in the world, and one of the largest markets for US agricultural exports. Each year more than $4 billion worth of imported food comes through its ports. About one quarter of this comes from the United States.
The US food aid program originated in 1954 as a means of disposing of costly domestic agricultural surpluses. In that year, Congress passed the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act, known as Public Law 480. PL 480 enables food-deficit “friendly countries” to purchase US agricultural commodities with local currency, thus saving foreign exchange reserves and relieving US grain surpluses.
Egypt’s infitah is finding an echo in Iraq. The Iraqis are grappling with many of the same problems which caused the Egyptians to adopt such a policy: the shortcomings of public sector manufacturing and of collectivized and semi-collectivized agriculture. As in Egypt, the sudden and dramatic rise in oil revenues made it possible to consider far more than minor rearrangements. The sudden surge of revenues also made it possible to allocate investment capital to an emerging private sector without taking it out of the budgets of the public enterprises. Skilled labor shortages in both countries required new approaches in agriculture and industry.
Once irrigated and lush but now barren, the Mesopotamian plain circling the ruins of Gilgamesh’s Uruk makes present day calls for food security via vast new irrigation projects appear shortsighted. Irrigation today suffers the same problems as in ancient times — salt buildup in the soil, collapsing dams, irrigation channels narrowed and blocked by silt buildup — plus some new ones, such as pesticide runoff. But irrigation planners figure they have learned a few things since Gilgamesh’s time. We can expect Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and others to go on building new, expensive irrigation projects until they finally reach the limits of their water supplies. Reaching these limits should take only two or three more decades.
At first glance the results seem impressive: in less than a decade Saudi Arabia has turned itself into the breadbasket of the Gulf. Between the mid-1970s and 1985 wheat output grew more than tenfold, to over 2 million tons. During that period the increase in Saudi production accounted for four-fifths of the rise in wheat output for the entire Middle East and North Africa. [1] Wheat production is now far above domestic needs and there is a severe shortage of storage capacity. In 1984 Saudi Arabia gave Bangladesh 50,000 tons in food aid, and in 1985 started selling wheat to several Gulf states. King Fahd recently announced that the kingdom has talked with the European Economic Community about exporting Saudi wheat to Europe.
Access to food, and at what price, is a potent political issue in the Middle East today. The question is posed most starkly in conditions of war and armed conflict. The recent blockade of Palestinian camps near Beirut over many months reduced the inhabitants to starvation and compelled Palestinian forces to withdraw from Lebanese villages further south. Last year southern Sudan provided other images of blockade and hunger as government and rebel forces contested that region’s political future. Articles in this issue discuss the politics of famine relief in Ethiopia and Somalia — famines that to begin with resulted from the degradations of war in the Horn of Africa.
For working people in the United States, April is the month for rendering unto Caesar. This is the time when we pay for things like the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, the aircraft carriers cruising the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, and weapons to Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and a host of other worthies.
Raja Shehadeh, Occupier’s Law: Israel and the West Bank (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1985).
Fouad Ajami, The Vanished Imam: Musa al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
Jordan and Israel together have destroyed the post-Lebanon strategy of the Palestinian movement led by Yasser Arafat. King Hussein’s $1.2 billion five-year development plan for the Occupied Territories, unveiled in mid-July, provides the velvet glove to accompany Israel’s iron fist.
In early November 1986, just as the Iran arms story was breaking, Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave interviewed French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. On November 7, de Borchgrave published a front-page story based on the interview highlighting Chirac’s suspicion, which the prime minister also attributed to West German leaders, that the well-publicized Syrian bomb plot against an Israeli jetliner was concocted by the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. Israeli and American officials and media were then playing up the London trial of suspect Nizar Hindawi in order to distract attention from the Iran arms scandal and the capture of American mercenary Eugene Hasenfus in Nicaragua.
The US Navy calls it “violent peace.” One of its foremost academic boosters says it means “to fight without appearing to fight.” They are talking about low-intensity conflict. This is the term the US government uses to describe a strategy of fighting small, relatively cheap wars. Few US troops are involved, so there are few American casualties and there is no need for a draft. The US people may not even be aware of — let alone oppose — US involvement. The goal is to destabilize or overthrow “undesirable” Third World governments or to underpin the stability of “friendly” governments. As Col. John D.
Turkish government officials project spending some $15 billion over the next 12 years to bring Turkey’s military forces up to NATO standards. This would make Turkey’s arms industry one of the major growth sectors over the next decade. Military industries now employ over 40,000 people directly. Once current plans to manufacture equipment ranging from armored vehicles to military aircraft become a reality in the late 1980s, the number of people directly and indirectly employed by this sector will be counted in the hundreds of thousands. [1] With arms exports of some $400 million in 1985 and plans to build an arms industry geared to exports, Turkey may become the world's 14th largest arms producer in the next decade. [2]
Guns, Not Butter
US Corporation: AEL Industries, Inc.
Israeli Corporation: Elisra Electronic Systems (formerly AEL Israel)
Financial Relationship: AEL owns 58 percent of Elisra.
Military Products: Electronic warfare systems; telephone switching equipment. In 1984 approximately 50 percent of sales were for export. Awarded Israel Defense Prize in 1983 for collaboration with the Israeli navy on computerized battle systems. [1]
US Corporation: Astronautics Corporation of America
Israeli Corporation: Astronautics CA
Financial Relationship: Subsidiary.
Over the past two decades, a combination of factors has significantly reoriented the Israeli economy toward military production — weapons for Israel’s military and for export to juntas, minority regimes and dictators around the world.
Israeli officials justify this development of military industries and arms export markets on the need for independence from foreign suppliers and the consequent need to lower the per-unit cost to the Israeli military. Israel now appears to be the largest producer of armaments in the Third World. [1]
Forty years ago, arms production in the Middle East was limited to a few small factories producing rifles and ammunition. Today, arms production has become a very big business in the region, with annual output worth more than $4 billion and rising. Of the 23 Third World countries with extensive military production, five are in the Middle East. One Middle Eastern state, Israel, is the largest Third World arms exporter and has one of the largest arms industries in the world. Egypt and Turkey are the other two major arms producers in the region, followed by Iran and Pakistan. Munitions and small arms producers include Algeria, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan and Tunisia.
