“They told us, ‘Food is coming, food is coming.’ But we saw it wasn’t coming.”

Update on the battle to get the farm aid bill changed

Families participating in an American-financed irrigation project from 2002 to 2006 were promised payment in corn for clearing the land and digging canals. The Kenyan government objected to the importation of American corn because the country was awash in a bumper harvest that had caused corn prices to plunge.

The result: American officials, prohibited by law from buying the corn locally, could not deliver it. As the impoverished families waited in vain for sustenance from the American heartland, malnutrition among the youngest children worsened and five people died of hunger-related causes.

Ikai Moru, 19, still recalls the hunger that gnawed at her and her mother as they chopped down thorny acacia trees on their tiny plot, hoping one day to reap a bountiful harvest from the parched earth. She watched her mother grow thinner and paler, and finally sicken and die.

“My mother was a very hard worker,” Ms. Moru offered in a brief epitaph.

Through sheer grit, the 2,000 families finished the irrigation system last year and are successfully farming. But long-term projects to help Africa’s rural poor feed themselves are chronically underfinanced, charities say.

…

Across Africa, the United States is more likely to give people a fish — caught in America — that feeds them for a day than to teach them to fish for themselves. Since last year, for example, the United States has donated $136 million worth of American food to feed the hungry in Kenya, but spent $36 million on agricultural projects to help Kenyan farmers grow and earn more.

And even that small budget for long-term projects in Kenya is expected to dwindle. The United States Agency for International Development, known as Usaid, in seeking to concentrate scarce resources, has dropped Kenya from the list of countries eligible for undertakings like the irrigation project here.

…

With the guidance of the Christian charity World Vision, which implemented the project, the families hacked an irrigation system from the barren landscape with machetes, hoes and shovels, clearing 1,000 acres and digging 99 miles of canals along the Kerio River.

Ms. Moru will soon be feeding her four younger brothers and sisters with an abundance of sorghum and corn harvested from their half-acre farm, fulfilling her mother’s dream.

The success is noteworthy, but the families’ sacrifices also illustrate the risks of an American food aid system that is designed to benefit domestic agribusiness and shipping interests and enmeshed in an intricate framework of farm subsidies.

Members of Congress who favor the current system say the support of influential commercial groups is needed to sustain political support for food aid. They warn that ill-timed purchases of food in Africa in times of scarcity could send food prices higher, harming poor consumers.

But critics in Congress contend that the United States could feed far more people more quickly if it could buy surplus food in Africa. It might also help boost the incomes of African farmers, by providing a market for their crops, they say.

…

Even without the American corn that was supposed to keep them going, the families here were determined to grasp their once-in-a-lifetime chance at fertile plots of farmland. Ms. Moru, 14 years old when construction began, recalled how she and her widowed mother had taken on the acacia trees together. They lopped off branches barbed with thorns, burned the trunks and uprooted the stumps.

“It was the heaviest work we had ever done, but we had no choice,” Ms. Moru said. “It was the only way to get land to plow.”

Their success was all the more extraordinary given this desiccated region’s history as a graveyard for well-intended foreign aid efforts to help the Turkana tribe, mostly nomadic herders, escape punishing cycles of drought, hunger and death.

The participants themselves credit a man who gave them fortitude when they faltered: Daniel Mwebi, a Kenyan engineer who managed the project here for World Vision.

From 1992 to 2004, he lived for much of each year in this remote place, far from his wife and children. He said he had been determined to avoid the mistakes of earlier aid projects that relied on heavy earth-moving equipment and diesel-run pumps that required costly fuel, expertise and maintenance.

So he designed a very basic system and trained the Turkana in the masonry, carpentry and welding skills they needed to keep it running. The earthen irrigation systems — built in two United States-financed projects — are powered only by gravity and the sweat of the local people.

What Mr. Mwebi could not have anticipated, however, was how the workings of the American food aid system would deeply complicate that plan, which Usaid financed for $4 million over five years.

When it came to tiding the families over with American corn, the Kenyan government objected, said Simon Nyabwengi, then World Vision’s Nairobi-based manager of the Turkana project. “They offered a very reasonable option,” he said. “They said we appreciate the project, it’s a good project, but we don’t want you to bring in maize.”

William Hammink, who heads the office of Food for Peace at Usaid, confirmed that the corn was never delivered because the United States was prohibited from buying it in Kenya or paying duties on imports.

“We kept waiting,” said Aemun Imong, a 32-year-old mother of four. “They told us, ‘Food is coming, food is coming.’ But we saw it wasn’t coming.”

~ by brownbomber on July 30, 2007.