RIGHTS: New Luxury Jet for the King as Famine Stalks Swaziland

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MBABANE, Aug 8 2002 (IPS) - The timing could not have been worse. The week that UN agencies at work in the kingdom called for 19 million U.S. dollars in emergency food relief from international donor source to prevent hundreds of thousands of Swazis from starving, government announced it is purchasing a 50-million-U.S.-dollar luxury jet for King Mswati.

‘’The jet is the most expensive purchase government has ever made, including its share of building Maguga Dam, which was the country’s largest public works project. It is inevitable that people will look at how the money is spent, given the food crisis in the country,” says Janice Dlamini, who works with a Catholic aid organisation in the eastern low veld. The area is heavily affected by food shortages after a mid-summer drought caused widespread crop failure.

Critics of government land policy, including the UN agencies, say those crops would not have been as devastating if a programme of irrigation had been put in place, and attention was given to food security.

The controversy over the king’s jet will pass, but the need to address agriculture policy reform will remain.

Swaziland has no emergency food storage capability, despite annual crop shortfalls that have made government’s National Disaster Food Relief Task Force a permanent institution.

‘’The problem is systematic, in the way agriculture is organised,” says agriculture ministry field officer Jerry Khumalo.

The Times of Swaziland commented, ‘’For a nation that has an agriculture-based economy, it is wrong that we cannot feed ourselves.”

On the surface, it is puzzling that a nation where 80 percent of the population lives on communal Swazi national land under chiefs faces chronic food shortages.

Apart from government spending on luxury items like a jet for the king whose price is equal to a quarter of the national budget, and more than annual spending on health services, there are fundamental land use problems that underscore why agricultural field officer Khumalo classifies the problem as systemic.

‘’Government policies have emphasised industrial food crops and timber rather than food security,” says a report by UN agencies on the current humanitarian crisis in the country. Industrial crops are defined as large-scale commercial agricultural enterprises like citrus and sugar, which is Swaziland’s main export. Sugar brings in hard currency that goes directly into the treasury, but does little to alleviate the suffering of drought victims.

‘’Irrigation has been largely directed to increasing sugar cane production,” says the report, which notes that only one percent of land used by peasant farmers receives irrigation water. ‘’Very little resources have been made available to upgrade productivity on commonly held Swazi Nation Land.”

In rural lands, 114,000 people, representing about 15 percent of the nation’s population, survive on one meal a day. This ‘’meal” is hard maize porridge sometimes augmented by edible weeds, which in the dry winter season are hard to procure. Wildlife including birds was long ago hunted to extinction in rural lands, so meat is an unknown luxury.

Even without the strain of a food shortage, two-thirds of Swazis live below the poverty line. The ‘Times Sunday’ newspaper this week contrasted what it called the neglect of government for the welfare of starving people with the lavish banquets hosted last month for visiting Libyan leader Mu’ ammar Ghadafi.

As if symbolising the distracted attention of leadership was the way Ghadafi himself stopped his motorcade to visit a ‘’typical” Swazi rural homestead, only to find that in today’s triple crises of food shortages, AIDS, and overpopulation, the home was too typical.

Two widows told the Libyan leader they were raising 13 children after the children’s parents succumbed from AIDS, but had no food or water. They begged Ghadafi for a handout. He departed, forgetting to offer anything, but then lavished hundreds of dollars on an entertainer he met at a tourist attraction.

The suffering caused by the food crisis is hitting rural lands hard, and has been felt in urban centres mostly through rising food prices. But that will change by year’s end.

The UN agency report describes as a ‘’most likely scenario” the number of Swazis at risk from starvation rising to 231,000, encompassing a quarter of Swaziland’s population.

‘’The worst case scenario is that if the food security crisis persists into next year, half the population faces widespread hunger,” says Alan Brody, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) representative in Swaziland.

Either scenario will have a negative impact on towns, as refugees from rural lands arrive in the hope of finding employment, or to beg or steal the means of sustenance.

‘’A massive influx like that into towns will surely increase crime,” says Vusie Masuku, public relations officer for the Royal Swaziland Police Force.

Social welfare agencies foresee an inevitable increase in urban slums, which are already infested by cholera. All of this is against a background of AIDS that finds 34.2 percent of the adult population infected by HIV.

The death from AIDS of family members required for the labour-intensive farming in rural areas is a contributing factor to the food crisis.

Like many crises, this one may galvanise policy makers to shift their priorities. Industrial cash crops for export to crops are important to bring in foreign currency and provide employment, but not at the expense of Swaziland’s food security needs.

If a back to the food basics approach is not forthcoming, food shortages are likely to continue, and the social meltdown feared in a country no longer able to cope with poverty and AIDS will increase a humanitarian tragedy.