Africa’s Economic Woes to Persist, U.N. Official Says

Despite a rise in agricultural production, Africa faces a severe economic crisis in 1987 marked by heavy debt burdens, the collapse of commodity prices and cuts in U.S. aid, a U.N. official said Friday.

At a press conference in the Ethiopian capital, Adebayo Adedeji, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, said adverse conditions in 1986 caused the economic growth rate to drop to 1.2%. That was below the average population growth rate, estimated at nearly 3%.

“As if to make matters worse, the U.S. Congress has recently taken the decision not to increase aid to Africa in 1987, but to reduce it by almost 40%,” he said.

According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, a total of $980.7 million in all U.S. aid--including food, military and economic--went to Africa, excluding South Africa, in fiscal 1986. The total will be $664.5 million in fiscal 1987, the agency said.

Economic Crisis Continues

“The economic crisis on the continent is still very much a reality,” said Adedeji, who is a Nigerian and a U.N. undersecretary general.

Factors contributing to the crisis include the collapse of commodity prices, adverse terms of trade, a drop in foreign aid, increased protectionism and a heavy debt burden.

Adedeji said there were signs of economic improvement last year on the continent, including a 3% rise in agricultural production, the highest increase in 15 years and a figure that “is slightly more than the population growth rate.”

The growth in agriculture was particularly significant, he said, especially considering the locust threat and severe drought the year before.

But he warned that some African countries will still need food aid in 1987, particularly those that “still have pockets of drought, a large population of refugees and/or are suffering from civil strife.”

Policy Changes Made

Adedeji said many African governments had introduced “policy changes and necessary structural adjustments which would make them less vulnerable to future emergencies and . . . assist in laying the foundations for self-sustained growth and development.”

He said some countries had implemented austerity measures, “at great political risk, as the recent riots and violent demonstrations in Zambia fully show.”

Despite the risk, he said, Africa’s ability to extricate itself from its economic ills depends largely on the further implementation of such programs.

One of Africa’s major problems is its nearly $200-billion total debt, equal to 44% of gross domestic product and 190% of export earnings, he said.

He said total export earnings of “developing Africa” crashed from $60.6 billion in 1985--”itself a poor performance year”--to $44.3 billion in 1986, and called the slump in export trade “unprecedented perhaps since the Great Depression.”

He attributed the drop in earnings to the collapse of oil prices and “the continuous downward slide in commodity prices.” The only exceptions were coffee and groundnuts, whose prices rose 17% and 67% respectively during 1986, Adedeji said.