Jon Jeter in Washington Post: AIDS plants crop of death in Africa

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

This is a very moving story in the Washington Post.

Jamie

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46397-1999Dec11.html

 AIDS plants crop of death in Africa  

By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December  12, 1999; Page A1  

		Zimbabwe - Planting season is just around the corner,
and were this any other year, Mark Magaya would be waiting
anxiously for the first good spring rain to soften the coarse
soil for his plow.

		But things are different this year. Magaya sleeps most
of the day. His legs tremble when he wanders more than a few
yards from his tiny mud hut. AIDS has pilfered his muscular
physique and he depends on his wife to bathe him, clothe him,
help him to his feet when visitors arrive. The tuberculosis that
occupies his lungs makes every breath a chore.
 

	There will be no harvest this year.
  
 
		"I am too weak to farm," he said one recent afternoon
while lying on the floor of his home. "Usually, I grow enough
maize to feed my wife and baby girl, and then I sell the surplus.
That gets us through the year. But this is the second year that
I've been unable to farm, and I don't know how we will make it.
My family survives on handouts from friends and family. My
condition grows worse from worry and hunger." 

		This is Africa's dry season. As surely as drought, as
swiftly as locusts, AIDS is devouring this continent's cash crops
by idling the once able-bodied farmers who work the land.

		Sub-Saharan Africa is home to two-thirds of the world's
33.4 million people living with AIDS, and the mostly agrarian
economies here are doubly cursed. Nowhere are people more
dependent on strong backs and sturdy legs for survival, yet no
population on Earth is as feeble.

           AIDS, isolated largely to the urban poor and gay men
in the Western world, has cut a much wider swath in Africa,
coursing like a river along the continent's major trucking
routes. Spread mostly through heterosexual contact, AIDS in the
Third World is the curse of the young - men and women with
children to raise and work to do.

		"When the breadwinner gets sick, the whole family shuts
down in a sense," said Timothy Stamps, Zimbabwe's health
minister. "We're burying people faster than we can replace them,
and there just aren't enough hands left to do the work. It's
really disrupting how we do business as a nation."

           AIDS in Africa has metastasized into a disease whose
progression is no longer measured solely by the depletion of a
patient's T-cells, but increasingly by every percentage point
that is shaved from a nation's gross domestic product. Developing
countries are losing their best and brightest workers - farmers,
schoolteachers, bricklayers and businessmen - just as governments
are trying to fasten their fledgling economies to a global
marketplace that doesn't wait for stragglers.

           More than 5,000 people with AIDS die each day in
Africa, and epidemiologists expect that figure to climb to almost
13,000 by 2005. By that time, health experts say, more people in
sub-Saharan Africa will have died from AIDS than in both world
wars combined or from the bubonic plague, which killed 20 million
people in 14th-century Europe. Ten percent of the work force in
southern Africa has been infected, and economists estimate that
the shrinking labor pool - coupled with rising health and welfare
costs, reduced spending power and lost investment - will slow the
continent's rate of economic growth by as much as 1.4 percentage
points each year for the next 20 years.

           In Africa's most industrialized states, including
South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya, the gross domestic product - an
economist's best gauge of prosperity - could be 20 percent lower
by 2005 than it otherwise would have been.

           "HIV is now the single greatest threat to future
economic development in Africa," said Callisto Madavo, the World
Bank's vice president for Africa.

           But it is not Africa's burden alone. AIDS is growing
fastest in Asia, and many health experts believe that it may
overtake Africa in the number of people infected with HIV, the
virus that causes AIDS. That creates a vexing problem for
investors in Europe and North America as their economies peak and
they increasingly turn to the Third World for profits.

           "What happens to the global market economy if there's
no one left to do the work?" asked Peter Piot, executive director
of the U.N.'s AIDS organization.

           That is precisely the problem facing sub-Saharan
Africa.

           At Zambia's largest cement company, absenteeism has
increased 15-fold since 1992, while over the same period Uganda's
railroad company has lost 15 percent of its work force annually.
AIDS accounts for 60 percent of all the employee claims for death
benefits filed with Southampton Assurance, Zimbabwe's largest
insurance company.

           "In most instances, these figures are roughly more
than 10 times what we expect to see in the developed world," said
Alan Whiteside, an economist at South Africa's University of
Natal.

           At Eskom, South Africa's electric utility, 11 percent
of the workers are infected with HIV, said company chairman Reuel
Khoza. Barclay's Bank of Zambia has lost more than a quarter of
its senior managers to AIDS, and a government survey of Kenyan
businesses revealed that costs associated with the disease have
slashed profits by almost 4 percentage points a year since 1994.
Surveys in Uganda indicate that 40 percent of its military force
has HIV, while classrooms in Malawi stay empty because a third of
all schoolteachers are infected.
							
           "These are people who cannot be replaced quickly or
easily," Piot said. "When they die, who will teach these
children?"

           Here in Zimbabwe, where nearly a quarter of the 12
million residents are infected, managers at the Vitafoam mattress
and furniture factory cope with employee turnover by training
three new hires for every job.

           "We expect to lose two of them within a year's time,"
said Taanda Marongwe, the plant supervisor in the industrial
center of Bulawayo, about 200 miles southwest of the capital,
Harare. "This way, work doesn't just grind to a halt when an
employee can no longer come to work. It is a difficult way to run
a factory, but it's the best way under these circumstances."

           But it's in arid, hardscrabble villages such as
Chegutu where AIDS has done its most damage, leaving the sick to
die, and their survivors often without food on the table.

           Maize production by Zimbabwe's peasant farmers and on
small commercial farms declined by 61 percent last year due to
illness and death from AIDS, according to a survey by the
Zimbabwe Farmers Union. Cotton, vegetable, groundnut and
sunflower crops were cut nearly in half, and cattle farming
declined by almost a third, according to the study. Overall,
agricultural output dropped by nearly 20 percent last year as a
result of AIDS, said Stamps, the health minister.

           Magaya, 37, had farmed his acre of land for nearly a
decade before he fell ill last year. His wife earns a trickle of
income by selling mud curios and shelves to their neighbors, but
mostly the family relies on friends for what little food they
have to eat.

           "Mostly it's porridge," Magaya said. "Maybe vegetables
and potatoes. Almost never any meat, though."

           Business at the local nameless convenience store has
declined dramatically in the past few years. "People just don't
have the money to spend any more," said the owner, Phillip
Mowere.
           School attendance has dropped as well. Parents are
hard pressed to come up with school fees, and many children are
kept at home to do the chores that would ordinarily have been
done by a parent, said Samson Musinanake, a project officer for a
health clinic here.

           Nicholas Soku, 69, would have retired years ago if not
for the pestilence that has struck his family. With the help of
his son, the widowed peasant farmer harvested just enough maize
and cotton for his family of three to get by in years past.

           But his 41-year-old son died of AIDS in June, leaving
Soku to tend the crops and care for his ailing daughter, who has
HIV.

           "My son was unable to help me in the fields the last
two years of his life, and last year, we harvested almost
nothing," said Soku, rail-thin and shirtless, his face heavily
creased by age and hard living.

           Struggling to pitch a makeshift tent, he rose from the
dust on a humid afternoon, wiped his sweaty forehead and surveyed
the landscape of angular, straw-topped mud huts that rise from
the ground like giant buried pencils in feverish dreams.

           "I do what I can now, but I am old, and most of my
time is spend looking after my daughter. We eat with the handouts
and odd jobs my neighbors hire me to do. But we are scrambling to
survive."

           When he fell ill last year, James Urayay, 35, sold his
livestock and fertilizer, and watched his three acres of land go
to waste. He is, he said, an unfussy man whose only concerns are
his family and in his ability to plumb cotton, tobacco and maize
from the land.

           "I don't have the energy to devote to either now," he
said. "I am very weak."

           He, his wife of 10 years and their four young
children, none older than 8, struggle, living on the kindness of
relatives. When he was unable to pay the electric bill earlier
this year, the utility cut off his service, and his aging parents
had to loan him the money to get the power restored.

           "I have farmed all my life," he said while staring
blankly into the fields he once worked from dawn to dusk. "It
wasn't much, but it fed my children and gave us enough money to
make it through the year. It pains me to see my kids and my wife
eat sadza [grits] and vegetables every night for supper."

           His wife, Tamary, said she has considered trying her
hand in the field. "But it is not possible. All my time I spend
attending to my husband and caring for my children. It is
difficult to do anything else."
           As she spoke, her husband sat on a wobbly plastic
chair outside the family's hut, staring past the fields and
toward the mountains that rumble across the sky like elephants
from a child's dream.

           He has lost more than 40 pounds, relatives say, and
everyone fears that he does not have much more time. He mumbled,
his words barely audible, seeming, almost, as if he were carrying
on a conversation with himself.

           "I'll miss the land," he said.