"Our job is to keep the pipelines full..." (drought prevention in Africa)

Despite ongoing conflicts in Africa which "exacerbate the difficulties" of dealing with the current African drought-related crisis, most food aid is "getting through" and most work is unimpeded by the conflicts, according to Maurice Strong, Executive Co-ordinator of the United Nations Office for Emergency Operations in Africa (OEOA).

"The good news is that in most places, the Governments, the international donor community and the United Nations providing the broad framework for all this activity are doing their job", he stated in an interview on 5 March on the World Chronicle television programme of the United Nations.

The "aid is flowing", he said, but the "main needs are still ahead. The next few months are the critical months and the pipelines at the other end are drying up now. Our job now is to keep that pipeline full."

It would be "a tragedy", he said, "if our attention span were limited to the times when the stories and pictures of starving African children appeared on prime time on our television screens and in the newspapers. We've got to show our interest well beyond the current emergency".

Mr. Strong also stressed that the African situation was "no ordinary emergency". It was, he said, "a deep-seated and very broad-based tragedy that is afflicting the larger part of a whole continent. We can't deal with it solely on a band-aid basis, directing our help for the moment to the immediate survival of people". While such survival was the first priority, he said "we also have to be concerned about the longer-term future of the people whose lives are today at risk because that risk is not going to disappear when the first rains begin falling".

African countries were experiencing the devastating consequences of the emergency when they were also "reeling from the effects of a world recession and the mounting debt burdens that they have had to incur over the last several years". That situation occurred "at the worst possible time for Africa", he said. Emergency assistance to the continent could not be seen in isolation from the other forms of support that the African countries needed. They also needed "more enlightened and sensitive policies" from the international community in general, from the International Monetary Fund, from the World Bank, "from those...