Feb 13th 2003 | JOHANNESBURG
From The Economist print edition
FAMINE has a new ally. If it were not for AIDS, southern Africans might be able to cope with the food shortages afflicting the region. But the epidemic is making millions too weak to grow enough food, and too weak to survive with empty stomachs.
In the past, when food was short, Jenerah Michelo, a Zambian subsistence farmer, could buy or beg from neighbors. But then her husband died of AIDS, leaving her with six children, a nearly empty food pot and a debilitating virus in her bloodstream. Now she is too feeble to forage, and neighbors are reluctant to help because she is a “patient”. Foreign donors sometimes bring food and tablets to treat convulsions. But the medicine should be taken after a full meal, “so I get side effects, I become weak and dizzy, I cannot manage.” She cannot get hold of anti-AIDS drugs, but if she could, they too would be useless without adequate nourishment.
For a year, the World Food Program (WFP) and others have strained to relieve a food shortage that affects 14m people in six southern African countries. James Morris of the WFP says that Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique will need aid for months to come, largely because the hunger is compounded by HIV and AIDS. In the six countries, one adult in four is now infected. Few people are actually starving, but many are succumbing to AIDS prematurely because they are weakened by hunger.
Alan Whiteside, a South African scientist who studies AIDS in Africa, and Alex de Waal, a development expert, are calling it a “new variant famine”. They point out that most of the 30m HIV-infected Africans are young women and men in their most productive years. (In South Africa, the average age of those dying from AIDS is 37.) With fewer hands to plant and harvest, crop yields drop. One recent study found that incomes in poor rural households with an HIV-positive member were falling by half. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 7m peasants and farm workers in 25 African countries had died from AIDS by 2000, and 16m more will die by 2020.
Children, especially girls, often miss school to look after the sick, or to grow food when their ailing parents cannot. The 2.5m AIDS orphans in the six countries are especially vulnerable: their parents have often died before they could teach their offspring about farming, or how to forage for wild roots and fruit in dry years. Broken families and poverty have forced some young women and children into prostitution, which in turn spreads the disease.
Matters are aggravated by the fact that, in Africa, more women than men are infected with HIV—and it is women who, besides everything else, do most of the farm work. Stephen Lewis of the UN children's fund says that the combination of hunger and AIDS “is the most ferocious assault on women ever”, and calls for donors to rethink how they should tackle the emergency. In Malawi and Zambia, for instance, there is talk of importing cheap, generic anti-retroviral drugs from India to fight the AIDS epidemic.
All famines are complicated affairs, with multiple causes. Some combination of war, weather, misrule or pestilence is usually to blame. In Zimbabwe, misrule and economic collapse may play a bigger part in the shortages than AIDS. Moreover, in most famines it is disease, not starvation alone that claims the most victims. In this respect, the famine-cum-AIDS alliance fits an established pattern.
* cum1 [km, km | km]L =with prep. 이 붙은[딸린], 와 함께
" a bed-cum-sitting room" 침실 겸 거실
" famine-cum-AIDS alliance " 기아와 함께 에이즈.
What is unprecedented is the scale of the disruption it is causing. According to Mr. de Waal: “AIDS has disabled the body politic...the worst-hit African countries have undergone a social breakdown.” And, indeed, there are signs of such a breakdown in Mrs. Michelo's village: her family cannot help her, her neighbors will not, and some have even been stealing her chickens. Such theft was unknown during previous food shortages, as was hoarding by the better off, which has now become commonplace.
Discussion Questions:
(1)How much did you know about AIDS before you read this article?
(2)Do you think AIDS is becoming an issue in Korea too?
(3)Should this problem be left for Africa alone?