The full picture of the famine in Africa is becoming clearer. Six million people are at risk in Ethiopia alone and 900,000 are likely to starve to death even with the relief operation.

According to a fairly conservative account, a similar situation prevails in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and in the Indo-Pak subcontinent. Internal disparities make the picture worse. In Ethiopia, for instance, 30 times more aid goes to the government than to the areas not controlled by it, mainly Tigray and Eritrea. The liberation fronts, controlling over 85 per cent of these areas, are receiving only 5 par-cent of what is needed merely to prevent death.

The international organisations from which one might expect more genuine support for the victims of famine are largely paralysed by internal difficulties.

The most important of these, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), has recently ended its meeting in Paris with no agreement on the Fund's second replenishment. As IFAD is one of the few organisations of its kind with equal voting power for the OECD and non-oil developing countries, one would expect its policy to be less exposed to the political interests of the OECD countries. Not so. The OECD countries want to see the share of Opec countries to the Fund increase beyond the 42 per cent in the first replenishment. The US has announced that it will reduce its contribution by $50m and offer $30m of the remaining money in the form of co-financing.

If this is the situation within the only UN organisation supposed to provide long-term solutions to food and agricultural production in developing countries one can't expect much from the rest. Equally important is the apparent unwillingness of many governments in developing countries to halt agricultural decline, caused either by years of negligence or by inefficient policies which have hardly benefited the lowest income groups in the sector.

Years of dependence on export demand from outside has left its mark on the agricultural sector in many developing countries. A sharp fall in agricultural output. affects 19 sub-Saharan countries, inflicting malnutrition and hunger on an estimated nine million people. While drought can mostly be taken as a short-term phenomenon, it causes much longer term problems. In the affected countries, drought has led to increased food imports, further fails in Gross Domestic Product, additional pressure on balance of payments, and particularly sharp pressures on agricultural population.

At the same time, a falling volume of primary commodity exports, combined with a falling absolute value of such products, have imposed serious problems and constraints on these economies. Furthermore, the value of their exports, including oil from those few African countries which do export oil, has been showing declining trends relative to the value of their imports from the West. In other words, they have been facing worsening terms of trade. Increased food aid and food imports, therefore, can only be regarded as short-term measures for relieving any of these structural problems.

In the 1960s, sub-Saharan economies were net exporters of food. In the 1970s there was a drastic reversal, with increasing reliance on food imports, and a persistent decline in per capita food production. The increase in food imports can be partly attributed to domestic supply bottlenecks, and partly to the demand resulting from rapid and unplanned urbanisation, which leads to major shifts in labour force structures.

Traditionally, sub-Saharan African economies' external sector mainly comprised of agricultural exports. The increased amount of food imports could be sustained so long as exports could hold up. .In fact, exports have fallen, particularly since 1977-1978, with the exception of tea. Five major export crops — coffee, cocoa, cotton, sugar and tobacco — illustrate the drastic downward trends. These crops constitute 72 per cent of total agricultural exports from sub-Saharan Africa, and have been facing      constantly declining terms of trade in the past decade — an annual average of 20 per cent. This fall in export revenue has pushed up the debt service ratio related to exports and thus implies a very high real cost to the economies so affected.

Apart from their unfortunate position in international trade, at least part of the problem ought to be sought in the development policies, investment priorities, urbanisation process, and other internal features of these economies. Egypt's experience is common to that of a number of less developed countries.

Since 1975 Egypt's domestic food production index has fallen by 6 per cent annually. However, while the economy is characterised by very high and increasing pace of urbanisation, and staggish rate of growth for domestic agricultural output, it does not feature low productivity in the primary sector, nor long-standing food supply bottlenecks.

Despite large food imports since the early 1970s, and consistently improving productivity in agriculture, there has been insufficient food supply to match domestic demand in the last decade. The economy has seen an aggregatefall of 10 per cent in food self sufficiency over the past ten years. Foreign aid flows, which currently amount to over 8 per cent of GNP, have not succeeded in alleviating the problem in any significant way. The problem is more deep rooted.

The present incapacity of the Egyptian economy to provide food for an increasingly urbanised population lies mainly in the fact that by 1981, the cost of food imports exceeded by some five times the sum of export revenue from the traditional staples like cotton and other agricultural exports. In 1980-83, in value terms, agricultural exports accounted for only 23.5 per cent of the value of all imports. Moreover, following the "open door" policy since the early 1970s, food aid on a concessional basis, and the use of the official overvalued exchange rates, underestimates the real cost of declining cereal self-sufficiency, and the cost of spot market purchases.

It is projected by some international surveys, that food self-sufficiency in Egypt will recede further while, at the same time, the agricultural trade deficit is likely to grow to massive proportions.

Shifts in the structure of the agricultural export sector have not succeeded in bridging the trade deficit, and this suggests that the contemporary framework of external agricultural trade acts as a definite drag on the overall performance of the economy. It is thus noteworthy that shortage of food, cyclical economic bottlenecks and the failure to sustain a reasonable level and standard of mass consumption are problems which can hardly be explained by purely "natural" causes.

The present policies of lagging investment in the agricultural sector (in Egypt, for instance, between the 1960s and 1979 the agriculture share of total investment fell from 25 per cent to a mere 8 per cent) is highly responsible for the overall poor performance of many less developed countries. The nature of their development policies, often modelled inappropriately on certain other economies with fundamental differences, has aggravated the problem; policies which have necessitated priorities such as cash crops over wage goods, rapid urbanisation without a parallel absorptive capacity for the growing urban labour force, draining the agricultural sector of its sources of livelihood, implementing indiscriminate open door strategies, and resorting to aid packages which in the long run have proven damaging to the economy and, above all, failure to ensure an acceptable standard of mass consumption, are all aspects which require serious considerations and active involvement on the part of the governments in the countries concerned.

On the external front, there is a large area of cooperation where capital surplus Muslim countries can play a leading role in improving deteriorating terms of trade in countries vulnerable to famine. Policies can range from positive discrimination in favour of agricultural exports from these countries, to financing joint projects in the field of agricultural machinery, a crucial area of investment for raising agricultural productivity.

Internally, there is a lot that the state could do to improve the terms of trade against agriculture, reduce regional disparity and redress income inequality in favour of the poor. In this respect one point needs special mention. Any external assistance or internal policy is most unlikely to remove famine unless its benefits can reach the lowest income groups.

The myth that famines are primarily caused by natural phenomena and sudden falls in food supply is being effectively challenged. Indeed the investigations of a leading famine analyst have shown that during the Great Bengal Famine food production actually increased while the disaster resulted in the largest number of victims in modern history.

It is now increasingly accepted that famines ciaim their victims mainiy among the poor, either small farmers or agricultural labourers. These are the groups particularly vulnerable to sudden shifts in their income, depriving them of the means to secure subsistence' food for themselves. These are the groups that ought to be the target of any counter-famine strategy because famine is primarily a phenomenon of poverty and income inequality, not of natural food shortages.