The Darfur Conflict, Part One: Humanitarian Aid and the Army Corps of Engineers

On campuses across America, student activists are calling for American intervention in Darfur. The genocide occurring there has become one of the latest political fads. “Save Darfur” shirts and information booths are a common sight, but finding someone who actually understands the depths of the conflict there is a harder task. Even finding someone who knows exactly what they mean when they call for action by the American government is difficult. Some want economic trade embargoes to be put on Sudan, while others want all nations involved to be part of a collective embargo. Some want America to send an unprecedented aid package in humanitarian aid, and still many more just want America to do “something.” What that something is, is anyone’s guess.

Some even want a NATO military force to be sent to Darfur to try and end the violence. What this really means, whether they realize it or not, is that they want an American military intervention, since the military might of all other NATO member nations combined would not have the manpower to even begin to take on this task with only a proportional American force along side them. An American military intervention or a mass aid package are both idealistic solutions and are nonviable options in the real world. In this first of a two part Article on Darfur, a non-military solution will be shown as impossible to achieve and harmful to even attempt.

Sending millions of tons of flour, rice, and other food supplies into famine struck regions of Africa has been a favored method of dealing with the problems gripping the continent for decades, while the amount of money spent on aid to third world countries has been a quick way to boost a donating nation’s status with the world. A simple look at the countries that receive this aid seems to indicate that this system does not work. At best it is a tremendous effort for short-term benefit and no long-term solution. At worst, it exacerbates the problems that any aid package hopes to solve.

This is just a large-scale version of the old saying, “if you give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish he’ll eat for a lifetime.” Sending massive food shipments to parts of Africa that are facing famine, generally, is never enough to even prevent all starvation deaths, but even worse is the dependency it causes. As a result of food, literally, falling from the sky, many farmers stop trying to cultivate the land. What’s the use if the crops often fail and America and Europe will feed the population better than farming ever could? So now the food aid can’t ever really end the famines, gives an incentive to farmers to stop working, which prolongs and worsens the famines, and the result is that this food aid promotes over population in areas that, clearly, cannot support the number of people currently residing there.

Aid must be coupled with the building of infrastructure so that the population can feed itself. Agricultural infrastructure is vitally important to the survival of any region’s population. Irrigation, larger canals, the capacity to produce fertilizer and the safest possible pesticides locally, and agriculture tools and equipment are all needed, as are crops that can produce best in whatever region is being modernized. Desertification is also a threat that needs to be countered in many regions with hearty plant growth that is permanent, and not part of a food crop that is dug up and replanted every year. Innovative methods of increasing food production and food diversity are needed to not only feed a greater portion of the population, but also help build up people's immune systems. Crop cycles should be established that replenish the nutrients in the soil will help prevent future crop failures, while canals and livestock watering ponds can have hearty fish species introduced. Livestock should be bred to improve the survivability and the nutritional value of animals. All of this means that when a region is facing famine, they need the Army Corps of Engineers just as badly, or more so, than they need protein powder dropped from a cargo plane.

Unfortunately for Darfur, the Army Corps of Engineers wouldn’t be on the job long before certain groups of people started shooting at them. For any infrastructure building projects to occur, a certain level of security must be won first. Since food aid won’t solve the problem and will probably be stolen by anyone with a gun to be sold for more weapons, and since Darfur is a war zone that is far too active for the massive building projects that would be required to give this region any hope of future prosperity to occur, only two options seem to remain. America and the outside world can do nothing and let the natives fight each other, as they have for decades, until one side finally wins and the genocide is taken to its bloody conclusion, or a massive foreign military force can be sent into Africa to engage and destroy all of the many combatants, or at least force them to accept a cease-fire. This is an impossible undertaking that America could never hope to achieve, even if Iraq had never been invaded. This military option will be the subject of the second article.