Governments play politics while African children starve

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16 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1985 ignorance on the part of the factory management," said Professor J.M. Dave, a well-known environmental authority, "as to the seriousness of the substances they dealt with."

This was the fifth reported gas leak at the plant since 1978. After a poisongas accident killed one worker in 1981, the main labor union at the Bhopal plant began a campaign to upgrade safety conditions. For the last four years Danik Bhaskar, the largest newspaper in the area, has charged that the plant's safety and maintenance were sloppy and that employees received inadequate training.

Members of the state assembly had also raised similar concerns but were ignored by the state's Congress Party government, whose close ties to Union Carbide, as labor leaders and environmental groups in Bhopal have charged, led them to turn a deaf ear to warnings of unsafe conditions.

There are no laws in India regulating storage of toxic chemicals. And there is no restriction on building chemical plants in urban areas, although a proposed law would bar hazardous-chemical plants within 15 miles of any city.

Thanks to the modern marvels of satellites and television, people can sit down to dinner and watch an African child dying of starvation in its mother's arms. Even the flies crawling on the face of the starving child are clearly visible in vivid color. In this way the drought and famine in the remotest part of Africa have been brought to the attention of the affluent West. People are shocked. They want to do something about it.

No television screen is large enough to encompass the vast extent of hunger and death in Africa. Twenty-five out of 42 African countries are suffering abnormal food shortages. Since 1970, it is estimated, 300,000 have died of starvation. Another half million may die before the end of 1985. Millions of those who survive will suffer serious mental or physical impairment.

Nature brings us droughts, but famine today is the work of man alone. Three years of little or no rain have devastated crops in a great belt across Africa south of the Sahara. Areas of drought extend southward into Kenya, Mozambique, and parts of South Africa. Here croplands become dustbowls and nothing will grow.

Drought is a recurring theme in Africa's history. If the government cannot or will not bring in surplus food from other areas, famine will follow. In earlier times slow travel and transportation often made famine relief impossible.

Today there is enough surplus food in the world to save every starving person. The United States can fly a division of 15,000 men and their equipment almost over night to any "trouble spot" in the world. A single airlift of some of the surplus food lying in American warehouses could save hundreds of lives.

The Ethiopians have t een dying of hunger for at least two yea rs. Their government has been calling for help, but the Reagan administration turned a deaf ear-until pictures of the starving children filled our TV screens.

Surplus food—a weapon

The American ruling class looks on its stock of surplus food as a weapon in its drive for world domination. President Carter imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union in retaliation for the invasion of Afghanistan.

Reagan spelled out administration policy in a State Department guideline issued Jan. 30, 1981. Referring at that time to relief projects in Vietnam, the directive stated, "Donations made to these countries will generally not be approved except where the foreign pol(continued on page 12, in “Arafat re-elected despite discord”)