Swaziland: An Overview

Drought and AIDS Spread Hunger and Poverty

While there is a growing class of well-educated, professional Swazis, the majority of citizens are subsistence farmers or livestock herders. Their primary crop and staple of their diet is maize, or corn. Compounding longer-term issues such as overgrazing and floods, the lives of rural families have been made difficult lately by a severe drought that's now in its sixth year. Lack of food and lack of water are very real issues in Swaziland.

Major industries include textile manufacturing and sugar processing, both of which have also been hit with difficulties lately. The entry of China into world textile markets has caused many factories to close, while depressed sugar prices and price supports in the Northern Hemisphere have lowered earnings and opportunities for sugar processing companies and their employees.

Beyond these factors lies another: the high rate of HIV/AIDS. Unlike other diseases, which tend to strike the very young or the very old, AIDS kills people in the prime of their adult years – at the height of their working and earning power. Not only are individual families left poorer when their breadwinner sickens or dies, but the entire economy suffers increasingly from the growing lack of people to do needed work, from teachers to police officers, from business managers to construction workers, from shopkeepers to farmers.