Canada asked to do more on West Africa food crisis, despite cuts to aid budget

OTTAWA – Can Canada credibly ask other countries to contribute big bucks to fight a looming famine in West Africa when it has just chopped $380 million from its own foreign aid budget?

The answer is a qualified yes, according to a group of aid experts pleading their case for the 15 million people who face severe malnutrition in the seven-country Sahel belt that stretches from Senegal to Chad.

The head of Mali’s peasant farmers union, who was among the group Thursday on Parliament Hill, added one caveat: Please reconsider those Canadian cuts.

Oxfam Canada led the group — their caps figuratively in hand — in imploring Canada to lean on other countries to help raise the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to ward off the impending famine in the Sahel belt.

The group wants Canada to use its moral authority to galvanize support, both among European countries coping with sovereign debt crises and with Canada’s mammoth, inward-looking American neighbour preoccupied with a presidential election.

Complicating matters is that smack in the middle of the Sahel lies Mali, where rebel fighters deposed civilian leadership in a coup last month. The coup forced Canada to suspend $110 million in annual aid to Mali.

The coup more or less overlapped with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s budget, which with the stroke of a pen sliced $380 million — or 7.5 per cent — from Canada’s annual foreign aid spending.

Mamadou Goita, executive secretary of the Western African Peasants’ and Farmers’ Network in Mali, was well aware of those budget developments, but he remained undaunted as a he departed a sparsely-attended press conference on Parliament Hill for meetings with officials in the office of International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda. The minister herself was unavailable to meet him.

“The fact that there is this cut on the budget for development issues is a very, very sad situation for us. Because my country, particularly, has a strong relationship with the Canadian government for a long time,” Goita told The Canadian Press.

“So the fact that this is happening now is a very critical thing. This is also when we need more support from Canada. And we hope that it will be reconsidered sometime very quickly.”

Goita said Canada, despite its own budget cuts, can still help sway international opinion towards helping Mali because Canadians were among the first to answer an emergency appeal by the United Nations.

Canada pledged $41 million in February to assist the food crisis. That followed an emergency UN appeal late last year for $720 million, with less than half raised to date.

Robert Fox, the head of Oxfam Canada, said Canada’s recent contribution is commendable even though last month’s federal budget slashed future aid spending.

Fox says Canada can still work on pressuring allies to contribute more to the crisis, notwithstanding the budget cuts.

“We’re facing a huge crisis right now in terms of Canada’s commitment to international development and the funding that Canada is providing for international aid. We’re absolutely clear Canada is heading in the wrong direction,” said Fox.

“That said, in this region, on this issue, Canada was one of the first countries out of the gate,” he added.

“We think that the $41 million won’t be enough given that there are other key actors missing in action on this issue. But the critical point at this point is we need to bring together the world community and actually have them say: What are we going to do?”

Aid agencies have been sounding the alarm for months that West Africa is poised for a repeat of the famine that afflicted the Horn of Africa countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia last year. It afflicted 13 million people and killed tens of thousands of children.

The aftershocks of last month’s coup in Mali are compounding the food crisis rippling across West Africa, which was sparked by drought and poor harvests last year.

Mali once supplied food to poorer neighbours, but the flow has been stopped due to the political crisis that’s closed the country’s borders, said Goita.

Goita said he’s hopeful the aid suspended by Canada and others will soon be reinstated with his country’s appointment Thursday of an interim civilian president and the scheduling of elections.

But the aggravating impact of the coup cannot be overlooked. Nor can the role inadvertently played by Canada and its NATO allies.

Mali’s coup was led by the return of Taureg rebel fighters, who flooded back across the Sahel after the end of their last mercenary mission. They backed Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi before he was defeated by rebels in his own country backed by NATO air strikes.

Goita said the Taureg returned from Libya with more arms and heavy weaponry than before. The crisis in Libya, he said, became a “tool” that has aided some groups in their speedy overthrow of the government in Mali.

“How come NATO has left all these arms?” asked Goita. “They left the region and these people with all these arms.”