As the US Congress debates an omnibus farm bill, it is considering a small change that advocates say could make a big difference to the world's hungriest people -- allowing the US government to buy some food in Africa to feed the famished, rather than shipping it all overseas from the US.
The Bush administration, with odd-bedfellows support from liberal Democrats, has called for allowing the purchase of some food in poor countries to quicken responses to emergencies. But even so, its proposal would not have prevented the paradoxical deepening of hunger here during a long-term project to combat hunger in the harsh, arid reaches of northwestern Kenya.
Families participating in a US-financed irrigation project from 2002 to last year were promised payment in corn for clearing the land and digging canals. The Kenyan government objected to the importation of US corn because the country was awash in a bumper harvest that had caused corn prices to plunge.
The result: US officials, prohibited by law from buying the corn locally, could not deliver it. As the impoverished families waited in vain for sustenance from the US 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," 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 US is more likely to give people a fish -- caught in the US -- that feeds them for a day than to teach them to fish for themselves. Since last year, for example, the US has donated US$136 million worth of US food to feed the hungry in Kenya, but spent US$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 US Agency for International Development (USAID), in seeking to concentrate scarce resources, has dropped Kenya from the list of countries eligible for undertakings like the irrigation project here.
Such efforts are dwarfed by the epic scale of the need. Viewed from a prop plane buzzing like a mosquito overhead, the irrigated land here shimmers as a tiny oasis in a vast, dun-colored landscape.
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 404 hectares and digging 159km of canals along the Kerio River.
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 a US 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 US 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.
The Bush administration is now trying to change the law so that up to US$300 million of food can be bought in poor countries during emergencies.
The Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, where growers and landowners got US$1.58 billion in corn subsidies in 2005, is advocating a US$25 million pilot program to test buying food in poor countries for both emergency and long-term aid.
Even that modest proposal is meeting stiff resistance from farm state legislators. The House Agriculture Committee's version of the farm bill includes no such pilot.
The chairman, Representative Collin Peterson, a Democrat from Minnesota, said of his committee, "They're still of the mode that this should be American products we're using our tax dollars to provide them."
Peterson's district got US$367 million in corn subsidies in 2005, according to government data analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization.
Even without US 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.
Moru, 14 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," 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, Mwebi 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 US-financed projects -- are powered only by gravity and the sweat of the local people.
What Mwebi could not have anticipated, however, was how the workings of the US food aid system would deeply complicate that plan, which USAID financed for US$4 million over five years.
When it came to tiding the families over with US 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 US 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."
The lack of food was particularly dire for children under age five. World Vision surveys documented that the proportion of them stunted by malnutrition rose to about a third in 2004, from about a fifth when construction began in 2002.
The five people who died were Moru's mother, another woman and three children, according to Lokolonyoi, who said he reported the deaths to district authorities.
Hammink said he did not know what caused the worsening of malnutrition, though he said that provision of corn to the families would most likely have lessened it.
The UN World Food Program, with contributions from other nations, was able to obtain 75 percent more corn to feed Africa's hungry from 2001 to 2005 by purchasing it in Kenya, Zambia, and Uganda, rather than shipping it from the US, Michigan State researchers found.
As the building stretched over years, a portion of the promised beans and vegetable oil from the US was delivered in 2004, Mwebi said. Some corn bought in Kenya with private money also came. But it was too late to avert the hunger of the early years.
By 2005, the families each had one-fifth of a hectare of cleared land to farm. They grew enough food to donate almost 6,350kg for the needy still around them, said Hosea Lotir, who heads the local water users' association.
As they settled down to farm instead of wandering with their animals, the number of children in the Lokwii primary school more than doubled, to 857 -- and would have doubled again if it had not closed its admissions, school officials said.
The families here continue to nurture their verdant green spots of progress. Nearby villages are clamoring for irrigation projects of their own, but US officials say they do not expect to have the money to finance them.
As the sun neared its zenith one recent morning, the main canal in Morulem -- the site of the first irrigation project -- was a cauldron of flailing hoes and shovels. Women glistening with sweat gouged out tons of silt to clear a clogged channel.
On a later shift, it was the men's turn, and women squatting on the banks hectored them. Don't just shovel at the sides of the canal, they yelled, dig out the middle of it. That's the hard part!
"I know what I'm doing," Julius Edukon barked back. "I don't need your advice."
Arupe Eoto, a withered old woman, sought to mollify him with praise and a nod to the tribe's sternest taskmaster.
"You really seem to know what you're doing," she told him. "The hunger has taught you well."
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