Disaster Fatigue

Donor impatience also springs from false expectations of quick fixes. If famine were an accident of nature, it could be overcome. But nature doesn't cause famine; it only exacerbates it. Famine is a result of war, which drains a nation of precious resources needed for agricultural development. Too often, it is the product of dictatorial government, of corruption or overcentralized economic policy. Or it could be the byproduct of international politics: in Sudan earlier this year, at just the time a massive relief effort should have been getting started, Khartoum ignored repeated warnings of famine by relief agencies. Belligerence led to paralysis. Western donors, disdainful of Sudan's repressive regime and fearful that unconditional food aid would be diverted to the Army, were reluctant to act. Sudan's support for Iraq in the gulf crisis compounded the problem. "Anybody who tells you that politics has nothing to do with humanitarian aid is way off the wall," says a senior Western relief official in Khartoum. The people dying, however, are not the politicians. "Some of them don't even know the government exists," says Zeinab Abusham, a relief worker for CARE in Sudan. "They want something to eat, that's all."

Up to 300,000 people will die of starvation in Sudan this year, say aid officials in Khartoum, despite a relief effort that is finally underway. The United NationsWorld Food Program estimates the country needs 1.3 million tons of emergency grain to feed more than 7 million hungry people. So far, donors have pledged half that amount and delivered only 148,000 tons of food. Until recently, Sudan's military government refused to appeal for help. "It's not serious, not serious at all," Col. Muhammed Amin Khalifa, an officer in the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, insisted in January. Meanwhile, thousands of children perished in parched villages stretching from the Red Sea in the east to Darfur province in the west. Ironically, Sudan could feed itself-and export food to the neighboring Middle East-since less than half of the country's 66 million acres of arable land are being cultivated. Instead, the mostly Muslim leadership is spending $1 million a day fighting animist and Christian rebels.

Can shocking pictures of suffering, which elicited so much charity in 1984, save those at risk in Africa and the Subcontinent this time? Images are stopgap measures, at best; and their repetition breeds indifference. Back in 1980, the Brandt Commission warned that the growing gap between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, the rich and the poor, would lead to political and economic chaos on a global scale. The report urged world leaders to put aside their differences and act on "mutual interests in the field of peace, justice and jobs." Eleven years later, it still sounds like a good prescription for treating donor fatigue.

'A TRAIL OF DEVASTATION ALL AROUND'

As the Bangladesh death toll mounted last week, NEWSWEEK'S Ron Moreau flew over the devastated island of Kutubdia, one of the areas hardest hit by the storm. His report:

Crammed with 4.5 tons of bread in burlap sacks, the turboprop transport skimmed over Kutubdia Island. Dead cattle dotted the paddies. The broken hulks of fishing boats lay in fields more than a mile from the Bay of Bengal coastline. All that was left of most farms were small groves of leafless, twisted trees that once shaded a thatched house. But there were survivors-tens of thousands of shocked and half-naked villagers. They scrambled wildly across the paddies as the precious parcels fell from the plane's open cargo door and hit the muddy water.