It is true, Mr. Gumede, that the crisis is hitting poor countries, especially in Africa the hardest, but much is their own fault.

I have repeated this a countless number of times, but I'll repeat it once again : the UNPAAERD in late 1980's recommended that Africa devote at least 25% of its public investment to agriculture, with special focus on research and extension services, irrigation, rational fertiliser and pesticideuse, feeder road development, market and distribution outlet development including quality controla nd food processing industries, all aimed at triggering a new Green Revolution for Africa. In actual practice, this was never implemented, the most important Continental policy agencies (the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank, the Sub-regional Polcy institutions (in SADC, COMESA, ECOWAS, the Central African Economic Union, etc.) all misguidedly justifying the inaction of the ground that it would be uneconomical to do so until the US and EU have scrapped all agricultural subsidies. Malawi was the only exception, and that late in the day and, one has the impression, the strategy being more a serendipitous choice by a then-beleageuered Mutharika rather than commitment to the by=then outdated UNPAAERD programme.

Now that a huge food crisis is hitting the world, Africa finds itself ill-prepared. Even in South Africa where the former Minister of Agriculture had prepared a sound programme of sub-regional agricultural and rural renewal based on holistic land reform conceived at a subregional level and accompanied by mentoring programmes by South Africa's most succesful commercial farmers never really got off the ground. The reason it did not was shprt-term politicking. I could give details, but that would be somewhat unethical considering positions I have held in the past.

One hopes that the financil windfalls from on-going global demand-led boom in all commodities (from fossil-fuel oil and gas to minerals to cotton to palmfruit to coffee and cocoa) will not be diverted by kleptocrats to offshore bank accounts while they could be more productively invested in the countries where the revenues are generated. The uae of oil revenues for arms purchases in Angola (where the President is reported as having been involved in illegal dealings together with late French President Fracois Mitterand's son), the long-known-and- hidden but only-now-acknowledged diversion of huge amounts of funds by former President Obasanjo of Nigeria (a close Bush ally) and the oil-wealth-related scandals in Sudan, Mauritania and Chad are tragic precedents that leaves the independent but well-informed and well-intentioned observer to be cautious over any optimism or even naive generosity towards Africa in these hard times.

The people of Africa themselves are always very hard-working if ill-informed and often too submissive to thei kleptocrats. I don't support muscular outside intervention to correct things, but Africans must take greater responsibility for themselves.