DRC Is Rich with Farmland, So Why Do 22 Million People There Face Starvation?

Feb 21, 2021 | Vava Tampa
View Original

I was food shopping when I read the news. Nearly 22 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are facing starvation and malnutrition. Now. In 2021.

You have to wonder how a country with eight months of rain, more than 50% of all the rivers, lakes and wetlands in Africa, and more agricultural land than any African country, with the potential to feed up to 2 billion people, gets to the point where it is unable to feed its population of 100 million.

I felt broken, even guilty, and powerless. I reached for my phone and ended up surfing the net, reading one report after another; asking myself over and over again: how did we get to this?

I first wrote about famine in the DRC in 2017, when 7.7 million people were on the verge of starvation. Then, the UN said the scale of the crisis was on a par with Syria and Yemen. Barely three years later it has surpassed Yemen to become the world’s worst famine crisis. Yet we still rarely hear anything about it.

To put it in perspective, if the 22 million Congolese people facing starvation were a country, it would have a population larger than the Netherlands and Ireland combined – facing the world’s worst hunger and malnutrition crisis.

Traditionally, famine has often been caused by wars and natural devastation such as drought. In the DRC’s case, however, impunity is the root cause. The terrible irony is the seed of this starvation was actually planted by the international community as early as 2010, when the UN published a groundbreaking mapping report, documenting 617 war crimes, crimes against humanity and even crimes of genocide committed in the DRC between 1993 and 2003.

By then, Congolese people had already been ravaged by years of imported conflicts, which killed more than 5.4 million people between 1998 and 2008 – mostly through starvation or disease. Half of those who died were children – an entire generation, you could say – and fuelling these crises, according to the report, was impunity.