Food Aid for People of African Sahel Relgion

This research examines the issue of food aid for the people of the Sahel region of Africa. Sahel is a word derived from an Arabic word meaning shore. In the case of the Sahel, the sea is the Sahara Desert, and the shore, the Sahel, is the "belt of semiarid steppe between the Sahara desert and the fertile savanna of the West African Sudan" (Minority Rights Group, 1988, 5). The Sahel, thus, is a strip of land which streches approximately 3,000 miles in an eastwest direction, but which is only, on the average, about 250 miles deep in a northsouth direction.

The Sahel crosses parts of eight countriesSenegal, Mauritania, Mali, Upper Volta, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and the Sudan. The portions of Upper Volta, Nigeria, and the Sudan which are included within the Sahel, however, are relatively minorfrom the perspectives of both the individual countries, and the Sahel as a whole. Thus, it is those areas between the Sahara and the savanna of the West African Sudan which lie in the former French colonies of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad which primarily constitute the Sahel.

The question addressed in this research concerns whether or not emergency food aid should be provided to the people of the Sahel. Although the mere stating of such a question

1 2appears to be callous in the extreme, there are, nevertheless, valid justifications for its consideration.

In the spring of 1990, the attention of the world is once again drawn to the spectacle o

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The causes of hunger and famine in the world are many and varied. Certainly, not all of these causes are sinister, and natural phenomena (such as droughts) do not fall into the category of controllable variables. In some instances, however, hunger in some parts of the world does appear to be directly related to controllable variables. These variables include the 4policies of food exporting industrial countries, the policies of the countries in which food crises exist, and the structure of the world market for agricultural products (Morgan, 1979). With respect to the lowincome countries of the world, The World Bank (1989) reported that only six out of a total of 36 of these countries were able to provide their populations with the minimum daily calorie supply. The United Nations (UN) reported that upwards of 20 million persons die each year as a result of malnutrition (Kates, 1982). Hunger does exist in the contemporary world. Is it caused by the control of the grain production and marketing system by giant grain multinational corporations? Perhaps, in part, because even their supporters admit that ample food production exists in the contemporary period to adequately feed the world's population (Falcon, 1984). Th

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