Drought, Famine And Politics

Lack of rain isn't the only obstacle in the battle to feed millions in southern Africa. CBS News State Department Reporter Charles Wolfson takes a look at the political high hurdles yet to be surmounted.

US AID announced this week it was sending an additional 190,000 tons of food aid -corn, vegetable oil, corn-soy blend and beans - to the region, bringing the U.S. total to about 500,000 tons, about half of the projected need, as estimated by the U N's World Food Program. America's contribution is worth approximately $230 million.

The countries hardest hit are Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique. More than ten million people are being affected, according to the U.N., although the situation could be much worse. "We started planning for this last spring," said Natsios, referring to grain shipments earlier this year, adding, "we did catch it in time."

As if getting food to hungry people halfway around the world isn't hard enough, U.S. diplomats and aid officials are having to work around the region's biggest political headache: Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe. It hasn't been easy.

The Bush administration does not recognize Mugabe as the democratically elected leader of Zimbabwe, where the U N says more than six million people are in need. According to Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner, "the election (last March) was fraudulent and it was not free and it was not fair. So we're working with others, other countries in the region as well as throughout the world, on how we can, in fact, together encourage the body politic of Zimbabwe to, in fact, go forward and correct that situation and start providing an environment that would lead to a free and fair election. And we're working with the neighbors and others."

That's diplo-speak (as opposed to diplo-babble) for saying he's working overtime to find a way within democratic constraints to get rid of Mugabe. Because the Bush administration is dealing with Zimbabwe, a country which does have democratic institutions, it has not openly called for regime change, as it has for Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Secretary of State Powell will be in Johannesburg, South Africa early next month for a world summit on sustainable development and high on the unofficial agenda during many of the meetings he'll have with regional leaders will be how to bring pressure on Mugabe, in the near term, to allow the international community to help feed his people. Mugabe himself will be at the conference although it is very unlikely he and Powell will meet.

AID administrator Natsios says Mugabe's government is doing almost everything wrong as it struggles to ease the effects of the drought and prevent it from becoming a famine.

Among the biggest problems is that Mugabe's government continues to pursue a policy of confiscating all the food-producing commercial farms, often arresting their white owners. With those once productive farms now shut down, Natsios says the situation is exacerbated. "It is madness to arrest commercial farmers in the middle of a drought when they could grow food to save people from starvation."

Natsios and other American officials think they've gotten the upper hand in fighting the effects of this drought, but he's the first to acknowledge "we have to have the cooperation of governments." U.S. government policy, he says, is that "food aid will not be used for political or economic purposes or as an instrument of diplomacy in an emergency."

That leaves Powell, Kansteiner and Zimbabwe's neighbors, most especially South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, to keep applying pressure on Mugabe for political change, something he's likely to resist since it will mean relinquishing some, perhaps all, of his powerful grip on Zimbabwe.

By Charles Wolfson