Chicago Tribune - September 5, 2004
Laurie Goering, Tribune foreign correspondent

Each year the mother of three would weave grass place mats to sell at the local market, earning enough cash to pay for plowing, seed and fertilizer. Family and neighbors would help out in the fields, and by harvest time there usually would be enough food to last another year.

For the last four years, however, drought has withered Hlophe's young corn. Rising unemployment means her grass mats don't sell anymore, and AIDS is claiming the lives of the neighbors who once helped her.

Discouraged by years of crop failures, her children now say they have no interest in farming the hills where their family has lived for generations.

"I've been trying to teach them to farm, but they don't want it," the 67-year-old said. "I don't know what solution there is."

World's highest HIV rate

Swaziland used to be a fertile and relatively rich corner of southern Africa. But the country's age-old farming culture is rapidly being destroyed by a triplet of disasters: drought, unemployment and AIDS.

Swaziland, home to more than a million people, has the highest HIV infection rate in the world, with 38.6 percent of people older than 16 carrying the virus. The disease, which hits working-age adults hardest, has left thousands of hectares barren as farmworkers find themselves too ill, or too busy tending sick relatives, to work the fields.

In a country where 75 percent of people earn their livelihood from farming, AIDS--combined with persistent drought--has been catastrophic. By March, more than a quarter of Swazis will be reliant on food aid, and food prices will rise 25 percent for the rest, according to a new report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program.

Growing unemployment, now at 40 percent, also has taken a toll. Two decades ago, 25,000 Swazi men a year migrated to work in South Africa's mines, sending home money to pay for plowing, seed and fertilizer for the family farm. Today only 5,000 of those jobs remain. Work in Swaziland's fruit-canning factories and sugar and paper pulp mills is equally rare, employing only about 10 percent of the country's workers.

That has helped push two-thirds of Swazis below the poverty line and led thousands of farmers to sell their implements or eat the seed intended for next year's crop to survive. Others have decimated their livestock herds and savings to pay for treatment--and eventually funerals--for family members dying of AIDS.

"AIDS has completely distorted the whole picture. It's destroying the last remnants of our survival," said Ben Nsibandze, chairman of Swaziland's National Disaster Task Force.

Like many Swazis, he has seen much of the crisis firsthand. At his farm, crop production has fallen by 70 percent in recent years, due in large part to drought. He also recently had to chip in for a casket for a niece who died of AIDS; her family had exhausted its savings on failed treatment efforts.

Nsibandze blames the country's four-year drought, as much as AIDS, for Swaziland's accelerating downward spiral. But he admits his agency, formed a decade ago to deal with temporary crises, now faces a permanent one.

"We have no means of controlling this," he said of the AIDS crisis. "We were hoping this would pass, but this disaster just goes on and on and on."

International aid organizations, and Swaziland's government, have begun providing some aid packages of seed and fertilizer for hard-hit farmers. But the help is not nearly enough to address the scale of the problem, Nsibandze said.

Hlophe says she hopes to put another crop in the ground next month, when the planting season starts. But with no one in the family working, she has no money for seed or plowing.

'No money, no help'

"We have good land and maybe there will be rain," she said. "We will try by all means to farm. But we need money to buy seeds and for a tractor, and there's no money and no help."

One of the greatest threats from the farm crisis, international agriculture bodies warn, is that continuing crop failures may lead to a loss of traditional farming knowledge.

Swaziland's AIDS epidemic has created 60,000 orphans, a number expected to double in the next four to six years, Nsibandze said. Many of them--and many other children from poor families--no longer are in school because their families cannot afford to pay the fees and uniform costs.

Traditionally, most children would have learned farming skills from their parents and eventually taken over the family's fields. But now many parents are dying before they can pass on the skills, creating a first African generation with no knowledge of how to work the land, according to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

By 2020, the group says, many countries in southern Africa, including Swaziland, will have lost more than 20 percent of their farm labor force to AIDS.

"We're going to have an uneducated generation and they're going to be dependent," Nsibandze said.

Anti-retroviral treatment could slow the pace of deaths and help infected parents raise their children before dying. But only 3,000 of the estimated 240,000 Swazis with HIV or AIDS have access to government-provided anti-retrovirals, he said.

Meanwhile, hunger is accelerating the pace of AIDS deaths, raising fears that the crisis will worsen in the coming months.

Nsibandze is hoping for good rains late this year.

"If we could get a bumper crop, if everyone could get food, that would help," he said. But "that would be a miracle. We have no cause to think things will improve soon."

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