A boy stands in Mangwere village, near Salima, 125km from Lilongwe. REUTERS ALERTNET/RUTH GIDLEY
LILONGWE, MALAWI (AlertNet)- There are barefoot children with swollen bellies, dust where should be crops, and aid workers giving out food, but how do you know if this is the start of a famine or just another normal day in one of the poorest countries in the world?
Some aid agencies say seven countries in southern Africa are sliding into a crisis, and they want to shake the world into action before children start dying, but journalists are wary of covering a story when it might turn out to be relief workers crying wolf or simplifying the facts in order to raise cash.
&${esc.hash}39;We can&${esc.hash}39;t wait until we have emaciated children. It&${esc.hash}39;s better to prevent than to have to respond,&${esc.hash}39; said Tapiwa Gomo, regional information officer for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
&${esc.hash}39;We&${esc.hash}39;re not in Niger. It&${esc.hash}39;s not that bad. But there&${esc.hash}39;s a danger it could degenerate,&${esc.hash}39; Gomo said.
Aid agencies say unless they raise the spectre of an emergency, they don&${esc.hash}39;t get enough money.
According to the IFRC, an emergency has been building up since poor rains last year. It should be rainy season again now, but an unwanted dry spell has withered the first crops and many people have already eaten their survival stashes and seeds.
IFRC says Malawi has been hit hardest in a region where unpredictable weather, chronic poverty, HIV and some political issues have led to food shortages and spiraling prices.
&${esc.hash}39;It&${esc.hash}39;s up to us as press officers to bring it to the attention of the world. How is that person going to feed his children if you don&${esc.hash}39;t raise money? There is a child who is waiting for you to do something to save his life,&${esc.hash}39; Gomo said.
STEALING THE LIMELIGHTHe said dramatic disasters in other parts of the world during 2005 had stolen the limelight, and journalists were reluctant to focus on food shortages in Africa unless they fit the stereotype of skeletal children too listless to swat away flies.
&${esc.hash}39;We&${esc.hash}39;ve got the Pakistan earthquake. The tsunami is still getting the headlines &${esc.hash}39; Donors go where there&${esc.hash}39;s media attention. Here there are no skinny bodies and in Kashmir you have an earthquake with bodies under rubble.&${esc.hash}39;
The IFRC launched an appeal for southern Africa in October, and is still looking for funds.
Lindsey Hilsum, international editor of Britain&${esc.hash}39;s Channel 4 News, said aid agencies should be careful not to cry wolf too often, or journalists would become wary of false alarms. She said aid agencies had done this before when they said Malawi was suffering from an emergency in 2001 and 2002.
&${esc.hash}39;The aid agencies pushed the food shortages in southern Africa&${esc.hash}39; as an immediate crisis, when in fact this was an endemic crisis.
&${esc.hash}39;Maybe they should have explained that better to journalists who didn&${esc.hash}39;t understand,&${esc.hash}39; Hilsum said. &${esc.hash}39;That is a major reason journalists are slow (to respond) today.&${esc.hash}39;
Malawi, where more than 14 percent of the population is HIV-positive, has an average lifespan of 39.6 years, and almost 42 percent of the population lives on less than ${esc.dollar}1 a day.
Hilsum said the onus was on journalists to work out when a disaster story was being manipulated by governments, opposition politicians, aid agencies or U.N. organisations with their own axes to grind.
&${esc.hash}39;Aid agencies always want to raise money, and that&${esc.hash}39;s entirely reasonable,&${esc.hash}39; she said, agreeing that aid agencies were right to call attention to southern Africa&${esc.hash}39;s food shortages. &${esc.hash}39;It&${esc.hash}39;s an important story and it needs more coverage.&${esc.hash}39;
NEWS IS NOWHowever, she said: &${esc.hash}39;News is something that&${esc.hash}39;s happening, not something which is about to happen, or might happen. Our job is to report the news; their job is to prevent famine. Sometimes the two come together but not always.&${esc.hash}39;
Hilsum said both journalists and aid agencies bandied around a lot of clich&${esc.hash}39;s when they talked about disasters. &${esc.hash}39;I&${esc.hash}39;m not particularly interested in stories about skeletal children -- I&${esc.hash}39;m interested in the politics behind it all,&${esc.hash}39; she said.
But whatever the complexities, television news needs good pictures. &${esc.hash}39;If all the kids look fat and happy, it&${esc.hash}39;s hard to do a story about impending famine. That&${esc.hash}39;s just the nature of TV,&${esc.hash}39; Hilsum said.
Journalists&${esc.hash}39; lives are made harder when there isn&${esc.hash}39;t even a consensus in the aid world on whether a food crisis is an emergency.
While aid agencies such as the U.N. World Food Programme, CARE, TearFund and World Vision have launched appeals for southern Africa, and Oxfam has been distributing emergency food since September, M&${esc.hash}39;decins sans Frontieres (MSF) is not yet sure if Malawi is facing a crisis this season.
MSF maintains there was not a crisis in 2002.
MSF Belgium&${esc.hash}39;s head of mission in Malawi, Nathalie Borremans, said: &${esc.hash}39;An emergency is building, but you can&${esc.hash}39;t declare an emergency if normal methods are being put in place &${esc.hash}39; We try to be as cautious as possible.&${esc.hash}39;
MSF conducted surveys in the regions where it works in August, and said they did not indicate a crisis.
Borremans said the government had acted responsibly. &${esc.hash}39;It has attracted the attention it needed. The first aid imports are coming in,&${esc.hash}39; she said.
MSF is now helping to analyse the results of a government-commissioned nationwide nutrition survey from December. The data should be processed by the middle of the month.
&${esc.hash}39;We will act if the surveys indicate a problem,&${esc.hash}39; Borremans said.
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