African Leaders Approve Program to Feed Millions

African leaders ended a three-day summit meeting Saturday with a commitment to a five-year plan to help feed millions of starving people and to fight economic stagnation aggravated by a $170-billion foreign debt.

“Our credibility is at stake,” President Abdou Diouf of Senegal told the closing session of the summit of the 50-nation Organization of African Unity.

“Implementing this plan will not be easy,” said Diouf, the newly elected chairman of the OAU. “But we will be judged by its implementation. We have discovered our mission. We will not betray it.”

The 21st OAU summit also called for stiffer sanctions against the white minority government in South Africa.

Niger’s Foreign Minister Ide Oumarou, 45, was elected the new OAU secretary general. He replaces Peter Onu of Nigeria.

The theme of the summit was Africa’s economic crisis. On Friday, member nations adopted the so-called “Addis Declaration” setting a five-year plan for greater economic cooparation, agricultural reform and food self-sufficiency.

The declaration is non-binding on member nations, but it established a “permanent follow-up mechanism” to monitor implementation.

“We are determined not only to cope more efficiently with current and future emergencies, but are also determined to go beyond emergency and get to the root of Africa’s food and agriculture crisis,” the leaders said in a statement.

Western diplomats noted that the organization’s members had failed to implement earlier such plans because of a “lack of political will,” and that considerable effort will be needed to make the latest ambitious plan work.

They said it would take five to 10 years to gauge the impact of the Addis Declaration.

The success of the plan depends on reducing Africa’s $170-billion foreign debt, which has caused a considerable drain on the continent’s fragile economies.

The summit called for an international conference to deal with the debt problem, but prospects for that seemed slim in view of the reluctance of major creditor countries to deal with “debtors’ clubs.”

Regarding the continent’s millions of hungry and starving people, the summit proposed a series of steps to improve agricultural production and food distribution, including a pledge to increase public investment in agriculture by 20% to 25% by 1989.

A number of countries made pledges to the organization’s emergency fund for famine and drought, ranging from $5,000 from Guinea-Bissau to $10 million from Algeria, which presented its check during the conference.

The summit called for an international conference on sanctions against South Africa and proposed cutting air and sea links to the country and a ban on the sale abroad of Krugerrands.