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Rising to Africa's challenge

Cameron Duodu

Westerners must prevent the continent's misery sliding back into invisibility.

IT USED to be "aid fatigue" that made Africa's unending suffering unfashionable in the G8 countries. Now it is "misery fatigue." The very misery in Lebanon that should be strengthening the determination of all those with a conscience to redouble their concern for those in need appears to be making suffering in Africa invisible.

As I write, there are severe floods in two countries more usually associated with drought: Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. Hundreds of people have already died; thousands have been driven off their land; crops have been ruined and animals drowned. At the same time, the impoverished governments of Ethiopia and Burkina Faso — like all those in Africa whose countries do not produce oil and gas — are battling to finance essential imports of oil, whose price has almost trebled in the past 12 months.

As if the situation in these particular countries were not bad enough, on the global stage hopes have been dealt a death blow by the failure of the WTO to reach any agreement at its Doha round of negotiations. The talks on easing trade tariffs and abolishing food subsidies in the rich countries had been going on for a good 20 years, until they were torpedoed last month.

Everyone must come on board "locomotive Africa" this time — the aid agencies, the anti-debt campaigners, the youth and the student movements.

When you've been to Africa and seen people drinking dirty water, and burying the infants who die from it, the type of squabbles that split apart pro-Africa campaigners become quite obscene.

So long as the rich countries artificially limit Africans to benefiting from less than 3 per cent of world trade it will be quite simply impossible for Africans to pick themselves out of their economic rut. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(Cameron Duodu is a Ghanaian novelist and journalist.)

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