Is Global Warming Causing Africa’s Famines?

Dennis T. Avery

“Global warming is helping to cause an unprecedented series of famines, which is pushing the world beyond its ability to cope, according to the United Nations,” writes Geoffrey Lean, environment editor of Britain’s Independent newspaper.

The Earth is “facing a worrisome situations with catastrophes occurring daily, causing enormous damage and making climate change an undeniable reality,” said Morroco’s Mohamed Elyazghi, outgoing president of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Oct. 23.

The culprit in this hoax is the United Nations Environmental Program, which apparently wants us to believe that global warming is causing the droughts now threatening millions of people in southern Africa and the Horn of Africa. But today’s global temperatures are not significantly higher than the temperatures in 1940. How can global warming that we haven’t had be causing drought and famine in Africa?

Nor does Africa need global warming to have droughts. Africa has been drought-prone for eons. Droughts bring the sort of periodic devastation to Africa that hurricanes visit on the Caribbean and Central America. Frequent drought is why Africa’s traditional food staples are millet and cassava. Though neither is as productive or tasty as many other plants, they are among the world’s most drought-tolerant crops.

Africa had major, life-threatening droughts in 1973 and 1984. The environmentalists said then that overpopulation was to blame and that expanded African crop production and livestock grazing had altered the African climate.

Now they claim that global warming is to blame, and they have no more evidence for this assertion than they did for their previous one.

The global computer models used by Global Warming theorists say that the earth should have warmed much more by now, what with all the greenhouse gases released since the beginning of World War II. Indeed, it is a major embarrassment to the environmental movement that temperatures haven’t gone higher. The earth’s industrial output soared during the past 60 years as never before in all history, but you wouldn’t know it from the temperatures. Or from the drought frequency in Africa.

“Droughts are frequent and severe in many countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and have a devastating impact on their peoples and economies,” the World Bank wrote in a 1998 report. “The extreme vulnerability to rainfall in the arid and semiarid areas of the continent and the poor capacity of most African soils to retain moisture result in almost 60 percent [of the continent] being vulnerable to drought and 30 percent being extremely vulnerable.”

Zimbabwe’s corn yields demonstrate the problem, zigzagging up and down with its rainfall totals. In 1991, Zimbabwe harvested 1.8 million tons of corn. During the drought of 1992, it produced only 20 percent as much. 1995 was a bad year, with only 840,000 tons of corn produced, followed by 1996, with plenty of rain, and a bumper corn crop of 2.6 million tons.

Still, droughts don’t cause famines. South Africa has no famine this year; it wisely stores grain from its good years, and its economy has grown enough to buy imported grain if it’s needed. In 1959, when the Communists dragooned their farmers into communal farms, China had a famine with no bad weather.

Southern African countries had no famine after the bad 1992 drought, but they’ve managed their affairs badly this time. For example, Zambia sold off its grain stocks amid rumors of graft.

The UNEP hyped its global warming scare with the news that “about 9400 people died in natural disasters in the first nine months this year.” Unfortunately, next spring’s drought-driven weather death toll could be in the millions. UN-sponsored summits should quit lip-flapping about the long-term possibility of global warming and make a serious effort to mobilize food and health care for the 20 million or so people who will be immediately famished and/or homeless in Africa.

The UN should be focusing its educational efforts to help African governments deal with activist scare campaigns against donated American food aid. Come to think of it, however, the same people who want us to worry about man-made global warming (without evidence) are also unconscionably frightening people and governments about the safety of American biotech corn (also without evidence) in both the rich countries and the Third World. Those who prey on people’s fears exist both in rural Zambia and downtown New York. Political “witch doctors” shouldn’t rule in either world.