[stop-imf] NYT: Why People Still Starve

[Robert Weissman]

[snip]

By then, geopolitical necessities had changed, as had theories on how to
develop the third world. Benefactors began attaching tighter strings to
their money, first during the final decade of the Banda regime, then
with the subsequent elected government. The World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund had entered their ''structural adjustment''
period. Austerity in government spending was preached, the overriding
principle being that the poor were best served through the efficiency of
free markets. The fine print in most loan agreements committed
governments to reduce subsidies, curtail spending and sell off
monopolies.

Whatever eventual benefit there might be in such reforms, the immediate
impact on Malawian farmers -- paupers during the best of times -- was
distress. Corn prices, no longer set by the government, became
unpredictable. Given the risk caused by instability, the private sector
did not mature as expected. Worse yet, the kwacha was repeatedly
devalued. Falling prices in the world tobacco market had strained
already thin foreign-currency reserves. At the urging of the I.M.F., the
government instituted small devaluations in 1990 and 1991 and two larger
ones in 1992. Finally, in 1994, Malawi moved from a fixed exchange rate
for the kwacha to one that floated. For farmers, that meant the cost of
fertilizer, an imported good, ballooned as the kwacha shriveled.

Before, fertilizer had been subsidized. Loans had been, too. Farmers now
found themselves adrift ''in the worst of both worlds, a Bermuda
Triangle,'' deprived of the benefits of a regulated economy while yet to
gain the benefits of a free market, said Lawrence Rubey, the United
States Agency for International Development's chief of agriculture in
Malawi. He gave an example with some dismal arithmetic: in dollar terms,
the price of a bag of fertilizer had actually gone down. But in devalued
kwachas, the cost had risen fivefold. This was devastating to farmers
with badly leached soil. ''The past arrangement of high state control of
the economy was inefficient, but at least it was stable,'' Rubey said.

[snip]

New York Times
July 13, 2003

Why People Still Starve

By BARRY BEARAK

 Late one afternoon, during the long melancholia of the hungry months,
there was a burst of joyous delirium in Mkulumimba. Children began
shouting the word ngumbi, announcing that winged termites were
fluttering through the fields. These were not the bigger species of the
insect, which can be fried in oil and sold as a delicacy for a good
price. Instead, these were the smaller ones, far more wing than torso,
which are eaten right away. Suddenly, most everyone was giddily chasing
about; villagers were catching ngumbi with their fingers and tossing
them onto their tongues, grateful for the unexpected gift of food afloat
in the air.

Adilesi Faisoni was able to share in that happiness but not in the
cavorting. For several years, old age had been catching up with her,
until it had finally pulled even and then ahead. Her walk was unsteady
now, her posture stooped, her eyesight dimmed. As the others ran about,
she remained seated on the wet ground near the doorstep of her mud-brick
hovel. It was the same place I always found her during my weeks in the
villages of Malawi, weeks when I was examining the mechanisms of famine.
''There is no way to get used to hunger,'' Adilesi told me once. ''All
the time something is moving in your stomach. You feel the emptiness.
You feel your intestines moving. They are too empty, and they are
searching for something to fill up on.''

Hunger was the main topic of our talks. Most every year, Malawi suffers
a food shortage during the so-called hungry months, December through
March, the single growing season in a predominantly rural nation. Corn
is this country's mainstay, what people mainly grow and what people
mainly eat, usually as nsima, a thick porridge. Ideally, the yield from
one harvest lasts until the next. But even in good times the food supply
is nearing its end while the next crop is still rising from the ground.
Families often endure this hungry period on a single meal a day,
sometimes nothing more than a foraged handful of greens. Last year's
food crisis was the worst in living memory. Hundreds, and probably
thousands, of Malawians succumbed to the scythe of a hunger-related
death.

Among those who perished were Adilesi's husband, Robert Mkulumimba, and
their grown daughter Mdati Robert, herself the mother of four young
sons. The two died within a month of each other, unable to subsist on
the pumpkin leaves and wild vegetables that had become the family's only
nourishment. ''The first symptom was the swollen feet, and then the
swelling started to move up his body,'' Adilesi said of her husband's
illness.

It was strange the way Robert seemed to fade. Before the start of the
hungry months, it had been he who had kept the family going, leaving
before dawn each day to sell firewood or tend someone's fields. But then
work became impossibly scarce, and Robert seemed to be using himself up
in the search for it. ''At the peak of the crisis, there was nothing to
do but beg, and you were begging from others who needed to beg.''

As most people visualize it, famine is a doleful spectacle, the
aftershock of some calamity that has left thousands of the starving
flocked together, emergency food kept from their mouths by the perils of
war or the callousness of despots or the impassibility of washed-away
roads. But more often, in the nether regions of the developing world,
famine is both less obvious and more complicated. Even small jolts to
the regular food supply can jar open the trapdoor between what is
normal, which is chronic malnutrition, and what is exceptional, which is
outright starvation. Hunger and disease then malignly feed off each
other, leaving the invisible poor to die in invisible numbers.

Nowhere is this truer than in sub-Saharan Africa, where President Bush
was recently scheduled to travel. Each year, most nations in the region
grow poorer, hungrier and sicker. Their share of global trade and
investment has been collapsing. Average per capita income is lower now
than in the 1960's, with half the population surviving on less than 65
cents a day. It is a situation seldom noticed, as wars on poverty are
neglected for wars more animate. African countries now hold the 27
lowest places on the human-development index -- a combined measure of
health, literacy and income calculated by the United Nations. They
occupy 38 spots in the bottom 50.

During the past decade or so, the poorest of Africa's poor have suffered
as rarely before. Merely to survive, they have sold off their meager
assets -- household goods and farm animals and the tin roofs of their
homes. Just now, the most urgent need is in Ethiopia, Eritrea and
Zimbabwe. But hunger has become a chronic problem throughout the region,
often occurring even under the best of weather conditions. The World
Food Program warns that nearly 40 million Africans are struggling
against starvation, a ''scale of suffering'' that is ''unprecedented.''
Coincident with the hunger is H.I.V./AIDS, which has beset sub-Saharan
Africa in a disproportionate way, cursing it with 29.4 million
infections, nearly three-quarters of the world's caseload. Very few of
the stricken can afford the drugs that forestall the virus's death work,
and family after family is being purged of its breadwinning generations,
leaving the very young and the very old to cope.

With survival so precarious, life is lived at the edge of nothingness,
easily pushed over the side. Take Malawi, I was told again and again --
for this land-locked, overpopulated nation in southeastern Africa seems
to be a favored specimen of researchers. There is a relative innocence
to Malawi's impoverishment: no tyrannical dictator currently in power,
no army of goons marauding in civil war, no disastrous weather wiping
out the harvest. And yet last year, the nation was nudged into
starvation. It happened while there was grain in the stores, if only the
poor had the money to buy it. It happened while well-meaning people were
arguing about whether it was happening at all.

To track the origins of the crisis, my plan was this: to find a family
that had lost someone to last year's hunger and then work my way back
through the hows and whys. Though I mostly shuttled over the narrow and
soggy mud roads between Mkulumimba, Adilesi's village, and Lilongwe, the
capital, the actual route of causality reaches beyond Malawi's borders.
It extends toward wealthier nations and their shared institutions -- the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It travels the uncertain
ups and downs of global commodity prices and currency valuations -- and
of course passes into the limited access roads of humanity's conscience.

 "The new generation are the unfortunates, because now there is a food
shortage every year,'' Adilesi said. ''Things began getting bad when I
was done with my childbearing years. If they had been this bad before,
all my children would have died.''

In a Malawian village, guests are customarily greeted outside and
offered a mat as a seat. Adilesi's front door faced a broad clearing
that slanted down, allowing a splendid view of cornfields and acacias
and the Dzalanyama Mountains in the distance. About 20 yards to the left
was a banana tree and the ruins of an outhouse, its mud walls
half-collapsed by a recent storm. The main house itself was a single
room, about 9 feet by 12 feet, with a roof of bundled grass. In one
corner were the ashy remnants of a small fire. Otherwise, the room was
empty but for a tin pail, two pots, a few baskets and plastic bowls and
some empty grain sacks that could be used as blankets. Adilesi lived in
this hut with her daughter Lufinenti and 10 grandchildren. It was hard
to imagine the geometry that would allow them all to sleep in so spare a
space.

''We squeeze like worms,'' Adilesi said, explaining rather than
complaining.

Thin-faced and withered, the old woman owned only one set of clothes, a
colorful wrap that went around her waist and a faded T-shirt that showed
a San Francisco street scene and advertised Levi's 501 jeans. The
lettering proclaimed, ''Quality Never Goes Out of Style.'' She had no
idea what the words meant. ''Is this something offensive?'' she asked in
Chichewa, Malawi's main language, bending her head down so she could
examine the thinned cloth. The villagers all bought such used clothing,
the discards of people from richer nations. Children who had never seen
television unwittingly sported apparel that allied them with Ninja
Turtles and Power Rangers. Often, holes in these shirts rivaled the size
of the remaining garment. This shamed the children, and some refused to
go to school. ''I have no idea what San Francisco is,'' Adilesi said
with a smile, repeating the words she had just been told. ''I couldn't
tell you whether it's an animal or a man.''

She did not know her age, either, but she could remember the historic
famine of 1949. She was a youngster then, that year when the skies
cruelly withheld the rains. The undisturbed sun not only parched the
cornstalks; it seemed to melt the glue that held the village together.
Neighbors, once generous, hid away what food they had, afraid of theft.
Women sang prayers of apology to their ancestors for any conceivable
wrongdoing and begged them to reopen the clouds. Men wandered far from
their homes, disappearing for weeks in a desperate search for work. ''We
refer to it simply as '49,'' Adilesi said.

She married Robert soon after. She can't recall exactly when. Robert was
a nephew of the village chief, and their wedding was preceded by an
evening of dancing, with the entire village sharing in a feast of two
goats, several chickens and homemade beer. Vows were recited at the
African Abraham Church nearby. Adilesi would later bear 12 children,
including 8 who lived to be adults -- an average rate of survival in a
country where half the children suffer stunted growth and one in four
die before age 5.

Robert, tall and stout, was a good provider. As a young man, he went to
South Africa and toiled in the mines. Then, back in Malawi, he worked
for the forestry department, slashing away underbrush with his panga
knife. In a village of farmers, he was one of the few men who carried
home monthly paychecks. But that job ended four years ago, when the
government, under pressure from foreign lenders, drastically reduced its
payroll. Robert then spent more time farming and doing ganyu, day labor.

Toward the end of 2001, after an overabundance of rain and a
disappointing harvest, corn prices leapt as high as 40 kwacha per kilo,
about 50 cents, a forbidding sum for people used to paying a tenth as
much. Foraging became necessary, as it had been in '49, as it was last
year, as it is even now. The toil was not unproductive. In the openness
of the plain, with the daily rain slapping hard at the mud, edible
leaves reached out for the taking from small stems. They held vitamin C,
some iron, some beta carotene. Occasionally there were tubers. People
could eat, just not a balanced diet, just not enough.

Hunger, like many diseases, is often an abettor of death rather than an
absolute cause. Who really knew: was it the tuberculosis or the
malnutrition that came first, and which of them delivered the fatal
blow? But symptomatically, starvation usually arrives with anemia and
extreme wasting and swelling from fluid in the tissue. There can be loss
of appetite, and there can be diarrhea. Robert suffered all these
symptoms. That a grown man would be among those to succumb to the hunger
was not so uncommon. Men, it was explained to me, used up more of
themselves in the unceasing search for ganyu.

Whatever the undertow, Robert grew too weak to work. He and Adilesi went
to the government hospital, where he was treated for malnutrition, then
later treated for malaria, then sent home. When they released him, the
doctors said he needed to eat better or he would die. Inevitably, there
was little food, so he began his capitulation, imparting final goodbyes.
''He told me we needed to remain united as a family,'' said Kiniel, 16,
the youngest of his children.

 Robert's daughter Mdati fell ill soon after he went into his decline.
She was about 30. Her husband had been a philanderer to whom she had
said good riddance, and now she was suddenly incapable of caring for
their four sons herself. The entire family had always depended on her.
Mdati was the only one who could read and write. ''She went to school up
to the second grade,'' said her sister Lufinenti. ''She was very
smart.''

Unlike her father, Mdati couldn't keep food down when she found
something to eat. This raised a suspicion that she had somehow been
bewitched.

The family regularly attended the African Abraham Church, a tiny
red-brick building with pews and an altar molded out of mud. As with
most Christians in the area, they found ways to blend witchcraft into
their beliefs. ''Some people protect their fields with charms, but we
can't afford such things,'' Adilesi told me. This safeguard against
thievery required the intercession of someone with magical powers, a
sing'anga. (My interpreter -- the daily intermediary between my English
and the villagers' Chichewa -- used the word ''witch doctor,'' though a
more respectful term would be ''traditional healer.'') The family had
great hopes that a sing'anga could break the spell that gripped Mdati.
They took her to two of them.

The first, Bomba Kamchewere, is a tall, bony man with a missing front
tooth. When I visited him, he spread out a mat of tightly stitched reeds
so we could sit together beneath his favorite tree. He had been tutored,
in dreams, by Jesus himself, he said. But even with divine insight into
the curative uses of roots and herbs, his powers had limits. While he
claimed to cure stomachaches, venereal disease and tuberculosis, he
confessed that other sicknesses baffled him. AIDS was particularly
confounding, as was njala, or hunger, which had been Mdati's problem.
''With her case, the spirits told me I could not do anything,'' he said.
Then, somewhat shamefully, he confessed that around that time he himself
had endured njala, quite frighteningly so. ''I went three weeks without
any solid food, and I developed some strange swelling.'' At a hospital,
the doctors recommended that he eat more, which was advice that struck
the sing'anga as less than a revelation.

Mose Chinkhombe, a young, self-confident man with a spacious smile, was
the second healer. His home was hours away in the village of Chiseka. To
get there, the starving Mdati, limp as a rag doll, had to be placed on a
borrowed bicycle and guided over the roads by five companions, who took
turns keeping both her and the wheels steady.

A year later, the healer still remembered her. ''My diagnosis was
anemia,'' he said as he sat in a dark room on a half-sack of dried lime,
all the while shooing flies with an oxtail. He was in his vocational
attire, a spotless white frock and floppy hat. ''She was so weak from
lack of food,'' the healer said. ''I could treat her for this anemia.
But I told her she needed to eat enough food to recharge her body. When
she left, she had improved slightly. But then I heard she died.'' He
nodded rather forcefully as he said this. Then, perhaps in defense of
his medical craft, he apparently felt he needed to tell me the obvious,
that the ''big hunger'' had taken a great many lives during those dismal
months.

There is a belief that when a stray black dog crosses your path,
terrible times will come, he said. ''Last year,'' he explained, ''a
black dog walked across the entire country.''

 Some 11 million people live in Malawi, though far too few live
especially long. Average life expectancy from birth has fallen to 36,
one of the lowest figures anywhere, according to the World Health
Organization. Tuberculosis cases have doubled in the past 10 years, and
an estimated 16 percent of people ages 15 to 49 have H.I.V./AIDS, though
with little testing going on, few of them know it. Nearly 500,000
children have lost one or both parents to the virus, according to the
United Nations. In the villages, where AIDS is seldom discussed, people
call it ''government disease,'' because it seems to spring from the
city.

For the poor, conditions began rapidly deteriorating in the early 90's,
during the last days of the ''Lion of Malawi,'' Dr. Hastings Kamuzu
Banda, the Western-trained physician who was the nation's dictator for
40 years. Tobacco is Malawi's only major cash crop, and the doctor
amassed a fortune by granting himself valuable licenses to grow it. At
the same time, his government benefited from the foreign aid of
prosperous friends. The West applauded his steadfast anti-Communism;
South Africa admired his tolerance of apartheid. Banda ruled --
ruthlessly and myopically -- until 1994, long enough to take himself
well into his 90's and senility.

By then, geopolitical necessities had changed, as had theories on how to
develop the third world. Benefactors began attaching tighter strings to
their money, first during the final decade of the Banda regime, then
with the subsequent elected government. The World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund had entered their ''structural adjustment''
period. Austerity in government spending was preached, the overriding
principle being that the poor were best served through the efficiency of
free markets. The fine print in most loan agreements committed
governments to reduce subsidies, curtail spending and sell off
monopolies.

Whatever eventual benefit there might be in such reforms, the immediate
impact on Malawian farmers -- paupers during the best of times -- was
distress. Corn prices, no longer set by the government, became
unpredictable. Given the risk caused by instability, the private sector
did not mature as expected. Worse yet, the kwacha was repeatedly
devalued. Falling prices in the world tobacco market had strained
already thin foreign-currency reserves. At the urging of the I.M.F., the
government instituted small devaluations in 1990 and 1991 and two larger
ones in 1992. Finally, in 1994, Malawi moved from a fixed exchange rate
for the kwacha to one that floated. For farmers, that meant the cost of
fertilizer, an imported good, ballooned as the kwacha shriveled.

Before, fertilizer had been subsidized. Loans had been, too. Farmers now
found themselves adrift ''in the worst of both worlds, a Bermuda
Triangle,'' deprived of the benefits of a regulated economy while yet to
gain the benefits of a free market, said Lawrence Rubey, the United
States Agency for International Development's chief of agriculture in
Malawi. He gave an example with some dismal arithmetic: in dollar terms,
the price of a bag of fertilizer had actually gone down. But in devalued
kwachas, the cost had risen fivefold. This was devastating to farmers
with badly leached soil. ''The past arrangement of high state control of
the economy was inefficient, but at least it was stable,'' Rubey said.

 A yearning for the stability of the Banda days -- though rarely for the
doctor himself -- is a commonly expressed sentiment throughout the
nation. Malawi's youthful democracy has lacked equilibrium, even though
Bakili Muluzi, a onetime Banda protege who fell out of favor, has been
its only president. The unsteadiness results in large part from the
pull-and-tug of two parallel sources of power, the elected government
and the international patrons who finance it. Like many poor, heavily
indebted countries, Malawi operates something like a business in
receivership. Lenders and donors -- among them the World Bank, the
I.M.F., the British, the Americans and the European Union -- carefully
monitor fiscal policy and budget expenditures. Their approvals are
necessary, or their generosity is withdrawn. The spigot of aid goes on,
off, on, off.

Understandably, this has made for a peevish relationship. The Malawians
quite correctly contend that the donors are hypocrites: while opposing
state subsidies elsewhere, wealthy nations hand out $1 billion a day to
their own farmers, about six times what they give in development aid to
the globe's poor. (Nicholas Stern, the World Bank's chief economist,
once pointed out that each day, the average European cow receives $2.50
in subsidies while 75 percent of the people in Africa are scrimping by
on less than $2.) These subsidies also depress commodity prices,
undercutting the ability of developing nations to compete in world
markets and get their nations off the dole.

The benefactors, on the other hand, quite correctly contend that the
government is persistently wasteful and inconsistently honest, prone to
overspending on frivolous travel and lax in underwriting programs for
the poor. So they give their aid with a chiding finger and chastening
attitude: Malawi needs better government!

And yet good government, like good deeds, is most often a complicated
matter.

With fertilizer so unaffordable, the government in 1998 cooperated with
the British, the World Bank and others to furnish beleaguered farmers
with a ''starter pack,'' enough free seed and fertilizer to grow a
healthy quarter-acre, about 15 percent of a typical family plot. Soon,
the cornfields of Malawi took on the look of a bad haircut, with one
cluster of stalks as high as an elephant's eye and the rest barely above
the knee.

The starter-pack program combined with favorable weather to produce a
bumper crop in the 1998-99 season. In fact, the surplus was so great
that a newly established government safeguard, the National Food Reserve
Agency, was able to purchase huge amounts, fattening its grain stockpile
to about 190,000 tons. For Malawi, so often hungry, this cache was a
comforting buffer against famine. But it was also costly. The reserve
agency, without capital of its own, bought the corn with loans at a
staggering domestic interest rate, above 50 percent. Storage itself was
expensive, and after a second bumper crop in 1999-2000, there were
concerns that the untapped grain reserves would rot.

The donors felt adjustments were necessary. The starter-pack program now
seemed too benevolent. Were farmers to be given fertilizer forever? they
asked. If so, that would create a dependency that in the jargon of
development economics was ''unsustainable.'' So the program was
reconstructed as ''targeted inputs,'' cut in half to reach only the
''neediest'' of the destitute. As for the grain reserve, the donors,
like the government, fretted over those gargantuan interest payments. To
satisfy the debt, they suggested that the corn be sold, with future
stocks kept to a modest 35,000 to 65,000 tons, considered enough to meet
most emergencies until more grain could be imported.

 Malawi has stunning skies, with a blue so bright and clouds so shapely
that they seem to be the work of a cartoonist. Those skies are also
fickle, suddenly exchanging a sunny disposition for an angry pout and
unleashing thunderstorms that seem to hurl water rather than drop it. In
February and March of 2001, as the harvest approached, the skies were
angrier than usual, causing regional flooding. That brought the first
clue of the trouble to come. This accumulating water kept the fields a
hearty green, but the cornstalks, standing uncomfortably in shallow
pools, failed to mature fully. Many a farmer was fooled by the deepness
of color. They had thought they were going to have a good harvest and
did not face the disappointing truth until it came time to pick.

Farmers were not the only ones fooled. Crop forecasters from the
Agriculture Ministry underestimated the impact of the flooding on the
corn harvest. These errors were compounded by a grossly wayward
overestimation of the cassava and sweet potato yield, a false optimism
perhaps bred from a false pride. The Agriculture Ministry was involved
in a multimillion-dollar United States aid program for crop
diversification. Field agents who reported high expectations for these
roots and tubers were the same people whose job it was to encourage
their planting. The net effect was to delay concern about the total food
supply. Indeed, a surplus was predicted: if people ran out of corn, let
them eat cassava.

By late summer, when the final estimates came in, the corn harvest was
put at 1.9 million tons, about a third lower than the excellent crop of
the year before. This was considered a bad though not a terrible yield.
And yet to those attentive enough, something ominous was happening. In
some areas, corn prices had increased more than fivefold, a sign that
stocks were perilously low. Though neither the nation's preoccupied
president, Bakili Muluzi, nor the donors were yet alarmed, the
Agriculture Ministry was fretful enough to advocate a grain purchase. In
September, a decision was announced to import corn from South Africa,
Tanzania and Uganda.

As usual, the government asked the donors to foot the bill. The donors,
in reply, inquired about the national grain reserves -- and were shocked
to learn that they were entirely gone. Yes, the donors acknowledged,
they had recommended the selling of most of it. But if the entire
storehouse was empty, who bought it? And where was the money?

Answers were not forthcoming. That infuriated the always suspicious
donors, so much so that the mystery of the missing grain overshadowed
the unfolding fate of the fragile poor for several crucial months. This
delay was tragic. By year's end, people were lining up at clinics to
plead for food. Jos Kuppens, an activist Dutch priest, said he saw
starving people resorting to meals of fodder, with one woman even
thickening her gruel with sawdust. He recalled a hopelessly thin little
girl he had seen at a Catholic hospital. He asked her where she was
from. ''I had to bend close to hear her,'' he said. ''She could barely
speak, and she said, 'njala,' which is the word for hunger. The sister
told me: 'There's nothing we can do for a child like this. It's too
late.'''

Despite the donors' unwillingness to pay the bill, the government tried
to proceed with its plans to import 220,000 tons of corn. But a freak
coincidence of disasters stalled deliveries: washed-out bridges, a
derailed train, a port on fire. It also became clear that Malawi's
neighbors faced a similar shortage. They began to vie to buy the same
food.

A British agronomist named Harry Potter, dean of the foreign
agricultural experts among the donors in Lilongwe, is a man far less
inclined toward wizardry than his fictional namesake. Nevertheless, he
saw a supernatural hand dispensing punishment.

''It was almost as if somebody up there had decided, Malawi, you have to
be taught a lesson,'' he said. But cosmic reprimand or not, the
consequences were of course grave only to the very poor and not to their
nefarious officials.

Little grain would arrive in time for the start of the hungry months in
December.

 Famine is variously defined by scholars, though its common usage most
often implies a large surge in hunger-related mortality. Some would even
designate a minimum body count. Malawians, at least linguistically, make
little distinction between ''hunger'' and ''famine'' except to say that
famine is ''the hunger that kills.'' Perspective, of course, changes
depending on whether you are studying the situation or starving within
it. Stephen Devereux of the University of Sussex -- an expert on African
food security -- talks about ''outsider'' and ''insider'' views of such
crises. Outsiders presume famine to be an extraordinary event, while
insiders see it as an intensification of what they already suffer.

The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen is the world's best-known authority on
famine. He argues that such catastrophes do not occur in a ''functioning
democracy,'' where a free press is a roving sentinel and elected
governments have strong incentives to take preventive measures. If so,
it is hard to say whether Malawi would be an exception. First, there is
the matter of how well the nation's nine-year-old democracy qualifies as
functioning. Then there is the question of whether the hunger that
killed Robert Mkulumimba and Mdati Robert qualifies as famine.

By the beginning of the hungry months, starvation deaths were already
being recorded within miles of the capital. Lilongwe seems a very
un-Malawian city, with a scattering of big office buildings and fancy
shopping malls. Notable on some thoroughfares are dozens of roadside
''coffin workshops,'' their carpenters steadily at work in the open air,
taking morbid advantage of a rare growth industry. Capital Hill -- home
to the government ministries -- is an isolated slope of manicured land,
best reachable by car, far away from the masses.

For weeks, I tried to interview President Muluzi. Finally, I was
informed that he saw no reason to see me since I had already spoken with
his friend Friday Jumbe, the finance minister.

That conversation had seemed cordial enough, though on reflection,
perhaps I was considered impertinent for asking about the missing grain
reserves. At the time of the sale, Jumbe headed a quasi-governmental
corporation that had physical control of the stored corn. A
parliamentary committee had investigated the deals, and while the probe
turned up little solid evidence, its report concluded that the reserves
were ''mainly sold to politicians and individuals politically
connected.'' Jumbe was faulted for failing to explain his recent
financing of a luxury hotel in the city of Blantyre.

''It is true that some people bought the maize at a price of 4 or 5
kwacha, and then one day maize became scarce,'' the finance minister
told me one morning in his office. ''That's business!'' Elegantly
dressed in a three-piece suit, he was dismissive, and occasionally
sarcastic, about the allegations. He said it was ''foolish'' to assume
that he was a thief just because he owned a hotel and pointed out that
the author of the damning report had been fired and that a revised
investigation of the facts was in the works. ''If there was any theft of
money, maybe, I don't know what, 100 or 200 or 300 kwacha -- but not big
money. But the donors, that's where the bone of contention is. They are
assuming that certain politicians bought this grain at a small price and
made a killing.''

Indeed, that is -- and was -- the assumption. To this day -- after two
years and five investigations -- the donors know little more than that
some traders bought corn for very little and sold it for quite a lot,
yet another scandalous story about people in the right place at the
right time with the right friends, a Malawian Enron. Unfortunately, the
donors' righteous pique played a part in the tardy recognition of the
deadly hunger, as did Muluzi's willful ignorance. In February of last
year, the president was still refuting any reports of a food crisis.
''Nobody has died of hunger,'' he insisted.

But by then, firm statistical proof had begun to appear in repeated
health surveys. Also, hospital admissions for severe malnutrition were
swiftly escalating far beyond the normal. At month's end, even Muluzi
did a turnabout. On Feb. 27, he declared a state of emergency in a
national broadcast -- 11 days after the death of Robert Mkulumimba.

 kulumimba is one in a cluster of five villages, each with 35 to 60
households. Their boundaries reach deeply into one another, and it was
sometimes possible to move between them simply by walking from hut to
hut. Any visit required the permission of the village headman -- the
chief -- who customarily then assumed the role of official escort. I was
fortunate to be befriended by Elias Mitengo, a 50-year-old headman
widely held in high regard. A poor farmer, he combined the gravitas of a
diplomat with the easy humor of a kibitzer. He was chief of the village
of Mdauma. And he was also Adilesi's son-in-law.

Elias said he had always tried to help his in-laws whenever he could.
But last year, he often did not have enough food for even his own
children. ''It was an impossible time,'' he said.

Being headman, an inherited job, included sensitive duties. The chief
allocated land and mediated disputes and sometimes judged criminals. He
was also the village marriage counselor and arbiter of property
settlements in the event of divorce. Elias prided himself on absolute
fairness. When I wanted to observe church on Sunday mornings, he went
along and even addressed the congregations. But generally, he said, he
no longer attended services. With five churches in the area, he worried
about favoritism.

One morning, Elias invited me to a meeting under a stand of trees.
Several chiefs were discussing a proper punishment for stealing food.
Instant justice was being applied in some places, with the hungry crook
forfeiting a hand. This, the headmen agreed, was too harsh. Yet when
thieves were simply turned over to the police, they were released after
a few days, and that seemed too lenient. A better penalty, the chiefs
agreed, would be stiff fines -- perhaps three goats or chickens. But
this was impractical. Thieves usually belonged to the poorest of
families. The discussion went on and on without resolution.

For Elias, hungry thieves seemed less a problem than organized crime. In
recent years, it was not uncommon for a truckload of men to descend
during the night. Usually, they rustled livestock. But sometimes they
emptied entire cornfields of ripe cobs. Elias decided to levy a 5 kwacha
tax on each household, enough to pay vigilantes to guard the roads,
waiting with axes and pangas and bows and arrows.

''These are not the best of days,'' he told me, laughing at his own
understatement.

Actually, Elias had plunged into deep pessimism, something he was more
likely to express after a few liters of chibuku, a cheap beer made from
corn and millet. He said the njala, the hunger, was prying apart
families, turning husbands and wives against each other. ''These women
carry their vegetables to the trading center, and if they can't sell
them, they sell themselves,'' he said. ''It's the poverty.'' Sometimes,
he told me, he would call village meetings to speak out against
prostitution, particularly addressing the young women. ''I tell them:
'You see your elders. They got to live this long because they kept
themselves clean of promiscuity.''' He would invoke the threat of
''government disease.''

Men were hardly blameless, Elias said. Some were lazy. And of those who
were not, some occasionally found work in other districts and then
returned home triumphantly with a second wife. Fear of AIDS was also
making men do crazy things. Some thought sex with a virgin cured the
virus. In parts of Malawi, this superstition had led to rapes.

''Things were never like this before,'' Elias said.

While I had done no scientific sampling, it seemed that more than half
the adults I met were not living with spouses. Women usually said they
had thrown their husbands out. Adilesi's daughter Lufinenti was typical.
Her husband, the father of her three children, had been gone from the
village for three years. ''He used to be a hard worker, but when he made
a lot of money, he wanted to marry more women, and I didn't want to be
in a two-wife marriage,'' she said. At any rate, there was now no chance
of his return. He had moved to the south and then died after a long
illness, one of his friends had told her. Maybe it was AIDS, maybe
tuberculosis, maybe both. ''They said he was always coughing,'' she
said.

In the case of Mdati, Adilesi's deceased daughter, her husband was also
described as a good worker, a man who could get construction jobs. But
his ''sleeping around'' had become intolerable. ''He'd even take other
women into their house,'' Lufinenti said. While she described these
dalliances, at one point she mentioned parenthetically that the ''last''
of Mdati's sons was now living with his father in a different village.
This unexpected detail confused me. For weeks, I had assumed that all
four of Mdati's sons were among the many small boys I always saw nearby,
playing with tops and homemade pull toys.

It was only then that I learned that the three youngest had died during
these past months, a tragedy so within the parameters of the commonplace
that it had not merited any special mention. The first boy died of
malaria, the second of a rash and high fever.

The third, Legina Robert, perished only in December. He was 3 years old
and very tiny, just another Malawian youngster with growth so stunted
that he had yet to walk. Children warming themselves by a fire dropped
him as they carelessly passed his body across the flames. The adults
were in the fields when they heard frenzied calls for help. The little
boy needed to be rushed to the hospital -- a three-hour journey by foot
but only half that if they had been able to borrow one of the village's
few bicycles. ''We looked, but we didn't find one,'' Lufinenti recalled.
''He died while I was carrying him on my back.''

 Paradoxically, food was growing everywhere, the slender cornstalks
nudging up against the roads, leaning along the hillsides, creeping down
to the river's edge. Crops were wedged into the spare emptiness of the
cities, spreading in half-ovals around office buildings, stores and
saloons, reaching even the back entrances of the government ministries.
To be in Malawi during the hot and wet growing season was to be embraced
by a landscape of tantalizing abundance -- a perplexing sight in view of
all the hunger.

But in Malawi, a visitor soon realizes that the lush color is a cruel
tease. All those planted fields, all that greenness, are merely symbols
of desperation. Crops appear in unlikely places because farmers feel a
need to stretch their holdings. Those inescapable cornstalks are
telltale of a nation growing food to fill its belly rather than to
compete in world markets. Little economic development is taking place.

Always on arrival at Adilesi's house, my first question was ''What are
you going to eat today?'' And each time I listened to the family's
contingencies, that day's single meal dependent on some relative being
lucky enough to get ganyu or Lufinenti being able to sell her foraged
greens in the city. When a little money was earned, the family spent it
frugally, never splurging on cornmeal but instead cooking gaga, a dish
made from only the outer husks of the corn kernels, a sifted residue
more commonly employed as fodder.

Adilesi's field is only a short walk from the house. The family's corn
plants were puny for that late in the growing season, and many of the
leaves were yellowish and droopy. Children broke off the least promising
stalks and chewed them like sugar cane.

On one visit, I was accompanied by Ellard Malindi, the country's chief
technical adviser for agriculture. He was a big-hearted man who talked
easily with the farmers. A few months later, tragically, he would come
down with cerebral malaria and die. But on that sunny day, he was at his
vigorous best, and during a stroll through Adilesi's field, he moved
from row to row, examining the sorry plants and shaking his head in
frustration. ''We're standing on the richest soils in the entire
country, maybe in southern Africa,'' he said as his arm cut an arc
through the air. ''We're in the medium-altitude plateau. But the soil
has become depleted by continuous planting, and it has lost its organic
nutrients.''

Goliati Faisoni, Adilesi's oldest son, was with us. A skinny, sickly man
with bloodshot eyes, he agreed with Malindi. The family would not be
reaping much this year. And however much there was, they intended to eat
it early, when the cobs were still new and green. The family was often
too hungry to allow their crops to ripen fully. Last year, in fact, they
used their green corn to feed the mourners at Mdati's funeral.

''Didn't you get a starter pack?'' Malindi asked Goliati.

The family had. But in their desperation they used the fertilizer
incorrectly. They were supposed to apply the bag of mixed nutrients --
nitrogen, phosphate, potash and sulfur -- when they planted, then a
second bag with urea when the stalks were knee high. Instead, the family
combined the bags. Then, rather than concentrating on one quarter-acre,
they spread it thinly over their entire field, hoping to outsmart
science.

''There were also beans in the pack,'' Malindi said. ''Did you plant a
bean crop?''

No, he confessed. The family had been unable to resist. They had eaten
the beans.

 Families starve because families lack money. In most cases, it is that
simple.

But last year, while most of Mkulumimba went hungry, its chief, Daniel
Mkulumimba, was getting by all right. I had often wondered about him. He
was the one man in all five villages whom others considered wealthy. His
tobacco field was only a 10-minute walk from Adilesi's door. ''He could
easily help people, and sometimes he does,'' Elias, the headman, told
me. ''But it's not his nature. He mostly takes care of his own.''

By American standards, Daniel was hardly rich. He, too, lived in a
one-room house, though it was a bigger room, and it was covered with a
roof that did not leak. He owned an ox cart, a bicycle, six donkeys and
four goats. Besides corn and tobacco, he grew cabbage, lettuce, turnips
and sugar cane on his 15 acres of land. He fertilized his fields, and
the healthy cornstalks towered above him. He had two wives and a pot
belly.

I wanted to understand why Daniel had not done more to help. When I
posed the question, he considered it for a few seconds before saying,
''When the food situation is very serious, the rich and the poor are the
same, and it's everyone for himself.'' I reminded him that his cousin
Robert had actually died of starvation. ''As the chief, I'm not supposed
to help one particular family,'' he replied. ''I'm chief of the whole
village.''

For me, Daniel came to represent the ''haves'' of the world. They do
assist Africa, though not with a strenuous effort, certainly not in
proportion to the hunger and the disease and the benumbing poverty.
Indeed, in relation to their gross domestic product, donor nations are
now spending considerably less on foreign assistance than they were a
decade ago. Among wealthy countries, the United States spends the lowest
percentage of all, something President Bush is understandably reluctant
to mention when he talks about Africa.

Many experts debate whether aid does more harm than good. Certainly
Africa's problems are immense and confounding: paralyzing debt, sorry
infrastructure, depleted soil, meager exports, bad government and ethnic
and tribal warfare. The majority of Africa's poorest countries have
average incomes below the level of Western Europe at the start of the
17th century, according to the distinguished economic historian Angus
Maddison.

Unlike the days when structural adjustments were seen as direct routes
to poverty reduction, now there seems to be little consensus on what to
try next. Proposals tend to be modest. In Lilongwe, I heard one idea
after another: soil renourishment, manufacturing schemes, public-service
jobs, small-scale irrigation. Lawrence Rubey, the American booster of
free enterprise, showed me a bag of chilies grown for export to Germany.
''Niche marketing,'' he said, in much the same way ''plastics'' was
advised in ''The Graduate.''

Maybe chili peppers can be one of the answers, maybe not. But in the
meantime, even if poverty and hunger seem unconquerable, famine surely
can be overcome. Only our indifference -- only our neglect -- allows it
to persevere. In Malawi, the timely distribution of fertilizer ought to
be preferable to the inevitability of emergency food. That is what every
farmer in the villages asked for: if you give us fertilizer, or a
reasonable way to buy it, we'll manage for ourselves from one hungry
season to the next.

As I heard these sentiments, I would always nod sympathetically, writing
the anguished words in my notebook. The people I met were invariably
gracious, even though I knew an unspoken tension existed between us.
After all, they were hungry, and I had the means to change that in my
wallet, as easily as I handed my kids lunch money back in America. But I
wanted to understand how people coped with hunger, and handouts would
have made that impossible. So I had made a decision in advance: if I met
people who seemed gravely ill, I would take them to the hospital and pay
their expenses. (That happened twice.) Otherwise, I'd give no one money
until the reporting was done.

And that day gave me as much relief as it gave them -- perhaps more. It
is awful to be with the hungry, to watch them ebb and falter and
scrounge.

''You ask so many questions about death!'' Adilesi said to me during one
of my final visits. ''It is hard on us. We believe that when you talk
about the dead, you get visits by their spirits at night. When are the
questions about the dead going to stop?''

I apologized but said that I had come to learn about hunger and that I
had learned a lot.

I thanked her for that. And that is when she and her daughter thought to
share with me their ''ingenious'' trick, something she thought every
human being ought to know.

If I were ever so hungry I could no longer work, they advised me, there
was a way for a determined mind to outfox a hollow stomach. ''Tie some
cloth tightly around your waist right at the navel,'' Lufinenti said.
''Make it as tight as you can.''

For a few hours, you can fool your belly into thinking that it's full.

Barry Bearak is a staff writer for the magazine. His last article was
about the reconstruction of Afghanistan.