The Foreign Service Journal, April 2003

10 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 3 HIV/AIDS Pandemic Drives Food Crisis in Africa There are 11 million orphans in southern Africa, 780,000 of them in Zimbabwe. In Malawi, 10 percent of families are headed by a child. Zambia lost 2,000 teachers last year to AIDS, and half the country’s students have dropped out of school. Seven million agricultural workers have been lost in southern Africa since 1985; another 16 million are projected to be lost by 2020. Some 70-80 per- cent of hospital admissions in the region are people with HIV/AIDS; 8,000 people die every 24 hours. These are among the chilling statis- tics presented to the U.N. and in meet- ings in Washington, D.C. with sena- tors, representatives and President Bush, by James Morris, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special envoy for humanitarian needs in southern Africa and executive director of the World Food Program, according to reports by allAfrica.com . Morris and Stephen Lewis, the U.N. Secretary General’s envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, returned recent- ly from a tour of Zambia, Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe, with an urgent warning that a new and bold approach was needed to meet the intertwined crises of devastating ill- ness and drought-afflicted agriculture in Africa, where some 40 million peo- ple are at risk of starvation today. “The magnitude of the disaster unfolding in Africa has not been fully grasped by the international commu- nity,” Morris told lawmakers. “An exceptional effort is urgently needed if a major catastrophe is to be averted. Business as usual will not do.” HIV/AIDS is a fundamental driver in the food crisis engulfing Africa, Lewis and Morris found. The HIV/AIDS pandemic is intersecting a crisis in the agricultural economy. In southern Africa, 14.5 million face star- vation, half of them in Zimbabwe, where drought, cyclone damage and poor governance are compounded by HIV/AIDS. The impact of HIV/AIDS on women and children, in particular, and the sheer magnitude of the num- ber of people who are infected, are without precedent. “My country is on the verge of extinction,” one head of state told Morris. Hunger is still the greatest threat to life, with more than 800 million people in the world chronically hungry, says Morris. And, with a surge in bothman- made and natural disasters recently, “the worst is yet to come.” A decade ago, 80 percent of the work done by the WFP was in development; food aid was used in food-for-work programs, nutrition and education projects to help the chronically undernourished. Only 20 percent of the work was in response to food emergencies. Today, nearly 80 percent of WFP operations are emergency-driven. And at the same time, ominously, offi- cial development assistance for agri- culture has dropped precipitously, from U.S. $14 billion in 1988 to bare- ly U.S. $8 billion in 1999, compromis- ing future agricultural output. Information Economics Intellectual property is a major issue in the information age, and, increasingly, a controversial one. So, it is perhaps ironic that China — known for its knock-offs of patented con- sumer goods — will host a World Intellectual Property Organization summit this month. WIPO ( wipo.org ) promises the April 24-26 meeting in Beijing will focus on “the key role of the intellec- tual property system in stimulating creativity and innovation to foster eco- nomic growth and social well-being through wealth creation and business development.” The World Trade Organization’s 1995 trade-related aspects of intellec- C YBERNOTES T he policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security. — John Brady Kiesling, former FSO, from his letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Feb. 27, 2003.