Economic Turnabout In Africa

Report Outline
Fresh Breezes in Africa
Reforms for a Continent
The Challenge Ahead
Special Focus

Fresh Breezes in Africa

The drought is over, the rains have come and Africa's famine has ended. Images of starving African children, which prompted a worldwide relief effort two years ago, no longer flash across the television screens of faraway countries. Yet Africa is still a continent on the brink of an economic crisis of staggering proportions. The grim reality is that 25 years after independence, and after massive injections of foreign aid, sub-Saharan Africa is poorer today than it was at the end of colonial rule, and is getting poorer all the time.

While most African countries could feed themselves 20 years ago, today imported grain accounts for one-fifth of the region's cereal needs. Africa produces babies faster than any other continent, yet it is the only one where food productivity is declining. Each year 24,000 square miles of African land is turned into desert by overgrazing, deforestation and poor farming practices. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts that if current trends continue, Africa can expect chronic famines that will be “far worse—if that is imaginable—than those of recent, times.”

Africa's international debt more than quadrupled between 1975 and 1983, and is still growing. Declining export receipts mean that the continent is less able to repay those debts than even the most heavily indebted Latin American countries. Investors, both African and foreign, are putting their money elsewhere. Blight and decay are widespread. Hospitals, schools, roads, railways and bridges are deteriorating at an alarming rate. In country after country, power, water, transportation and telephone systems either do not work or work only occasionally.