Tag Archives: Famine

Child hunger and death rising in Zimbabwe due to drought, charity says

By Katy Migiro

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Child hunger and deaths are rising in Zimbabwe due to the worst drought in two decades, with thousands facing starvation by the end of the year without additional aid, an international charity said on Thursday.

Southern Africa has been hard hit over the past year by drought exacerbated by El Niño, a warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which has wilted crops, slowed economic growth and driven food prices higher.

“This is an emergency,” Save the Children UK’s interim chief executive Tanya Steele said in a statement, after visiting Binga, on Zimbabwe’s western border with Zambia.

“Some children are already dying of complications from malnutrition.”

Mothers are foraging for wild berries and roots to feed their children, while going without food themselves for up to five days, the charity said.

The number of under-fives who have died of hunger-related causes in Binga town has reached 200 over the last 18 months — triple the usual rate, it said.

More than 60 million people, two thirds of them in east and southern Africa, are facing food shortages because of droughts linked to El Nino, according to the United Nations.

The U.N. World Food Programme estimates around 4 million people — one in three Zimbabweans — are struggling to meet their basic food needs.

The peak of the emergency is likely to be between October and March, the U.N. children’s fund (UNICEF) said.

Hundreds of young children across the country are being admitted to hospital for malnutrition each month, it said, while child neglect, abuse and child labor are on the rise.

HIV/AIDS is often one of the underlying causes of malnutrition in Zimbabwe, where 15 percent of adults are living with the disease, U.N. figures show.

The number of children suffering malnutrition is expected to rise sharply in the coming months, Save the Children said.

“Most of the severely malnourished children who receive no help are likely to die,” it said.

“Around half of these with moderate acute malnutrition could also perish without some form of intervention.”

El Nino ended in May but meteorologists predict a La Nina event, which usually brings floods to southern Africa, is likely to develop in the second half of this year,

Erratic, late rains in Zimbabwe led to a poor harvest in April, with some families suffering their second or third consecutive year of poor production, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET).

(Reporting by Katy Migiro; Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories.)

‘We Want Food!’ Venezuelans cry out at protest

People run away from police (on motorcycle) during riots for food in Caracas

By Efrain Otero and Marco Bello

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan security forces fired teargas at protesters chanting “We want food!” near Caracas’ presidential palace on Thursday, the latest street violence in the crisis-hit OPEC nation.

Hundreds of angry Venezuelans heading toward Miraflores palace in downtown Caracas were met by National Guard troops and police who blocked a major road.

President Nicolas Maduro, under intense pressure over a worsening economic crisis in the South American nation of 30 million, had been scheduled to address a rally of indigenous groups nearby around the same time.

The protest spilled out of long lines at shops in the area, witnesses said, after some people tried to hijack a food truck.

“I’ve been here since eight in the morning. There’s no more food in the shops and supermarkets,” one woman told pro-opposition broadcaster Vivoplay.

“We’re hungry and tired.”

The government accused opposition politicians of inciting the chaos but said security forces had the situation under control.

Despite their country having the world’s biggest oil reserves, Venezuelans are suffering severe shortages of consumer goods ranging from milk to flour, soaring prices and a shrinking economy.

Maduro blames the fall in global oil prices and an “economic war” by his foes, whom he also accuses of seeking a coup.

“Every day, they bring out violent groups seeking violence in the streets,” he said in a speech at the indigenous rally, which went ahead near Miraflores later in the day. “And every day, the people reject them and expel them.”

Critics say Venezuela’s economic chaos is the consequence of failed socialist policies for the last 17 years, especially price and currency controls.

The opposition wants a referendum this year to recall Maduro. Protests over shortages, power cuts and crime occur daily, and looting and lynchings are on the rise.

Several local journalists said they were robbed during Thursday’s chaos in downtown Caracas.

The government’s top economic official, Miguel Perez, acknowledged the hardships Venezuelans were undergoing but promised the situation would improve.

“We know this month has been really critical. It’s been the month with the lowest supply of products. That’s why families are anxious,” he told local radio.

“We guarantee things will improve in the next few weeks.”

(Additional reporting by Daniel Kai, Corina Pons, Diego Ore and Deisy Buitrago; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Girish Gupta; Editing by James Dalgleish; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Venezuela opposition slams ‘desperate’ Maduro state of emergency

Rally with Monkey Signs

By Alexandra Ulmer and Corina Pons

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s opposition on Saturday slammed a state of emergency decreed by President Nicolas Maduro and vowed to press home efforts to remove the leftist leader this year amid a grim economic crisis.

Maduro on Friday night declared a 60-day state of emergency due to what he called plots from Venezuela and the United States to subvert him. He did not provide specifics.

The measure shows Maduro is panicking as a push for a recall referendum against him gains traction with tired, frustrated Venezuelans, opposition leaders said during a protest in Caracas.

“We’re talking about a desperate president who is putting himself on the margin of legality and constitutionality,” said Democratic Unity coalition leader Jesus Torrealba, adding Maduro was losing support within his own bloc.

“If this state of emergency is issued without consulting the National Assembly, we would technically be talking about a self-coup,” he told hundreds of supporters who waved Venezuelan flags and chanted “he’s going to fall.”

The opposition won control of the National Assembly in a December election, propelled by voter anger over product shortages, raging inflation that has annihilated salaries, and rampant violent crime, but the legislature has been routinely undercut by the Supreme Court.

“A TIME BOMB”

Protests are on the rise and a key poll shows nearly 70 percent of Venezuelans now say Maduro must go this year.

Maduro has vowed to see his term through, however, blasting opposition politicians as coup-mongering elitists seeking to emulate the impeachment of fellow leftist Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.

Saying trouble-makers were fomenting violence to justify a foreign invasion, Maduro on Saturday ordered military exercises for next weekend.

“We’re going to tell imperialism and the international right that the people are present, with their farm instruments in one hand and a gun in the other… to defend this sacred land,” he boomed at a rally.

He added the government would take over idled factories, without providing details.

Critics of Maduro, a former union leader and bus driver, say he should instead focus on people’s urgent needs.

“There will be a social explosion if Maduro doesn’t let the recall referendum happen,” said protester Marisol Dos Santos, 34, an office worker at a supermarket where she says some 800 people queue up daily.

But the opposition fear authorities are trying to delay a referendum until 2017, when the presidency would fall to the vice president, a post currently held by Socialist Party loyalist Aristobulo Isturiz.

“If you block this democratic path we don’t know what might happen in this country,” two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles said at the demonstration.

“Venezuela is a time bomb that can explode at any given moment.”

(Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Famine threatens half of Yemen, U.N. agency says

SANAA (Reuters) – Nearly half of Yemen’s 22 provinces on the verge of famine as result of the war there and more than 13 million people need food aid, the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) says.

Aid groups have blamed curbs imposed by the Saudi-led coalition on access to Houthi-controlled ports for the crisis and also accuse Houthis of preventing supplies from reaching some areas, including the city of Taiz in the southwest.

“From a food security perspective, 10 of Yemen’s 22 provinces are classified as emergency, which is one step before famine,” Adham Musallam, deputy director of the WFP office in the capital Sanaa, said as the agency launched a food voucher program to help the most needy.

Fighting over the past year has displaced about 2.3 million people and left more than half of Yemen’s 26 million population in need of food aid, Musallam said.

“This means that we must not wait until the situation reaches famine but must act now to provide humanitarian aid directly,” Musallam said.

The Houthis took over Sanaa in September 2014, ousting President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, then seized his temporary headquarters in the southern port city of Aden.

The Saudi-led Arab coalition intervened in March 2015 to try to restore Hadi to power and roll back Houthi gains. More than 6,200 people have been killed in the conflict, half of them civilians.

To counter the food crisis, the WFP has launched a program of emergency food vouchers to provide up to one million people with basic needs eventually.

In Sanaa, which is still under Houthi control, hundreds of people queued for hours to register for the vouchers. Under the program a family of six receives wheat grain, pulses, vegetable oil, salt and sugar provided by the WFP through a local supplier.

But one Sanaa resident expressed concern that the aid might not be sustained.

“We would like to have rations provided for the entire month, not just for a week or five days,” he told Reuters TV.

Many Yemenis have sought refuge in Sanaa after air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition destroyed their homes, especially in northern Yemen, where the Houthis, a Zaydi Shi’ite group, come from.

The United Nations, which had hosted two inconclusive rounds of peace talks in Switzerland last year, is pressing ahead on the diplomatic front for another round of negotiations. A senior Yemeni official said on Tuesday it might take place in Kuwait next month.

“The Yemeni people appreciate the need for humanitarian assistance but what they really need is an end to the war which is more important,” said Radman Hassan, a food voucher recipient.

(Writing by Sami Aboudi, editing by Sylvia Westall and Angus MacSwan)

El Niño leaves millions of Africans vulnerable to hunger, thirst, disease

A abnormally strong El Niño weather pattern and extreme droughts have left millions of Africans vulnerable to hunger, water shortages and disease, a United Nations agency warned on Wednesday, including about 1 million severely malnourished children who need treatment.

The U.N. Children’s Emergency Fund, or UNICEF, said those children are located in Eastern and Southern Africa, where the extreme weather has adversely affected food supplies. It said families there have skipped meals or sold some of their possessions to cope with rising prices.

In a statement, Leila Gharagozloo-Pakkala, the agency’s regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa, called the situation “unprecedented” and warned of a long-lasting effect.

“The El Niño weather phenomenon will wane, but the cost to children – many who were already living hand-to-mouth – will be felt for years to come,” Gharagozloo-Pakkala said.

Meteorologists have said this season’s El Niño is one of the strongest on record and its effects are likely to continue well into 2016. However, the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs has estimated that areas affected by the El Niño-fueled drought will likely need two years to recover.

El Niño occurs when part of the Pacific Ocean is warmer than usual, setting off a ripple effect that brings atypical and often extreme weather throughout the world. It has been blamed for creating droughts in some nations and floods in others, both of which can destroy harvests.

Last week, four agencies issued a joint statement warning the weather pattern could devastate Southern Africa’s upcoming harvests. The World Food Programme, Food and Agricultural Organization, Famine Early Warning Systems Network and European Commission’s Joint Research Centre said parts of Southern Africa are in the midst of their driest season in 35 years, with Zimbabwe, Lesotho and many South African provinces declaring drought emergencies.

Other nations have implemented measures to reduce water consumption because of low levels.

Two of the harder-hit nations are South Africa and Malawi, and the agencies said maize prices surged to record-high levels in those countries. The agencies warned the window of opportunity to plant crops in Southern Africa had nearly closed, and forecasts point to another poor harvest.

“Over the coming year, humanitarian partners should prepare themselves for food insecurity levels and food insecure population numbers in southern Africa to be at their highest levels since the 2002-2003 food crisis,” the agencies warned, saying it was too early for an exact figure.

Any increase would add to the millions of people who currently need food aid.

That includes more than 10 million Ethiopians, a total UNICEF says could reach 18 million by December. The agency says children have skipped school because they have to search for water.

UNICEF says about 2.8 million people are at risk of going hungry in Malawi, while food insecurity poses an issue for 2.8 million Zimbabwe residents and 800,000 people in Angola.

El Niño has also brought heavy rains to Kenya, which UNICEF says is fueling cholera outbreaks.

The World Food Programme also recently said El Niño has hurt Haiti’s agriculture industry.

The weather isn’t the only the thing impacting people’s ability to secure food.

Violent conflicts have spurred food shortages in other nations, and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network says “emergency” conditions now exist in parts of South Sudan and Yemen.

Aid reaches besieged Syrian towns as planned

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Trucks carrying humanitarian aid entered five besieged areas of Syria scheduled for deliveries on Wednesday in a U.N.-backed deal to deliver help to thousands of trapped residents, an aid agency source and conflict monitor said.

The Syrian government approved access to seven besieged areas after crisis talks in Damascus on Tuesday, a week ahead of a planned resumption of peace negotiations between Syria’s warring parties.

The United Nations estimates there are 486,700 people in around 15 besieged areas of Syria, and 4.6 million people in hard-to-reach areas. In some, starvation deaths and severe malnutrition have been reported.

One hundred truckloads of aid were given to about 100,000 people, the United Nations said, as convoys entered Madaya, Zabadani and Mouadamiya al-Sham near Damascus which have been under siege by government forces, and the villages of al-Foua and Kefraya in Idlib province, which are surrounded by rebel fighters.

There have been several aid deliveries to Madaya and Zabadani and to al-Foua and Kefraya this year, but each has to be carefully synchronized between the warring sides so that convoys enter simultaneously.

The Syrian Red Crescent coordinated with the United Nations on the deliveries, which include wheat and high-energy foods, with medical teams being sent to some areas.

The world body has demanded unhindered access to all besieged areas of the country, where it says hundreds of thousands of people are trapped by fighting and deliberate blockades by various warring sides.

In Madaya, near the border with Lebanon, dozens have starved to death after months of siege by government forces and their allies.

In the city of Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria, parts of which are under siege by Islamic State militants, unverified reports have said up to 20 people have died of starvation.

Deir al-Zor was one of the seven areas to which the aid convoys were expected to head within the next few days, the United Nations said.

Yacoub el-Hillo, U.N. humanitarian and resident coordinator in Syria, said aid operations must continue beyond recent efforts to restart peace talks, but a solution to the root of the problem must also be found.

A humanitarian task force will meet in Geneva on Thursday to take stock of humanitarian access to besieged areas, a statement from the office of the special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said. That was in line with an agreement on humanitarian assistance reached in Munich last week by major and regional powers.

UNRELENTING FIGHTING

Syria’s opposition says it will not negotiate with Damascus until sieges imposed by government forces and their allies have been lifted – one of many issues that led to a suspension of the peace talks in Geneva earlier this month.

Talks are scheduled to resume on Feb. 25, but fighting and air strikes continue unabated throughout the country, where 250,000 people have been killed in five years of war.

In the town immediately next to Mouadamiya, Daraya, the Syrian army and allied forces continue a major offensive to take back the rural suburbs of Damascus still in rebel hands.

In Deraa city, south of Damascus, jets believed to be Russian pounded insurgent positions on Wednesday near a now-closed rebel-held border crossing with Jordan. The attacks appeared aimed at cutting rebel supply lines.

A fighter from al-Tawhid al-Janub Brigade, part of the Southern Front rebel alliance, said the bombing of the old quarter of Deraa city, which has been in rebel hands for nearly three years and whose residents have fled since the start of the conflict, was the heaviest in over two years. The army controls the rest of the city.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington in Beirut, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Kinda Makiyeh and Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by John Davison; Editing by Dominic , John Stonestreet and Peter Cooney)

Yemen city on the brink of famine, U.N. agency warns

Residents of one Yemen city are on the brink of famine, a United Nations agency warned Monday, as violent conflicts have prevented humanitarian workers from supplying food.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it delivered food to Al Qahira, a besieged area of the Taiz governorate, on Saturday, bringing enough food to last 18,000 people for one month. But it said Taiz remains at an “emergency” level on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification scale, one step below famine, and workers must be allowed to continue to deliver aid there.

The WFP said it has been delivering food to some parts of Taiz since December, though fighting between Houthi militants and government forces has complicated the agency’s efforts to move the supplies to the people in need. In a news release, it said about 20 percent of households in Taiz don’t have enough food, and many are facing “life-threatening rates of acute malnutrition.”

Taiz is far from the only Yemen city affected by fighting.

The UN says about 21.2 million of the country’s 26 million residents need some humanitarian aid, a 33 percent increase since violence erupted last March. The WFP says approximately 7.6 million Yemen residents are now “severely food insecure,” which requires urgent assistance.

Other countries are also in need of aid.

On Tuesday, the WFP said it was planning to deliver food this month to 35,000 people who have been affected by Boko Haram’s violent insurgency in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. In a statement, the agency said it recently supplied food to 5,000 people in Chad for the first time.

“We were told that people have been really struggling to survive. Some said that they have been surviving only on maize for weeks,” Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the WFP’s Country Director for Chad, said in a statement announcing the increased humanitarian efforts. “We have started distributions at five sites where the needs are most critical and we are working to reach others.”

The WFP said some 5.6 million people are facing hunger as a result of Boko Haram’s violence, which has prompted 2.8 million people to flee their homes — 400,000 since December alone.

Last week, the WFP issued warnings about the food situations in South Sudan and Haiti, saying that about 6 million people in those countries were facing food insecurity. That included 40,000 residents of war-torn South Sudan that UN agencies said were “on the brink of catastrophe.”

In Yemen war, hospitals bombed to rubble, starvation spreads

DUBAI (Reuters) – Elderly Hamama Yousif was rushed to the main hospital in one of Yemen’s largest cities after an artillery round lashed her chest with shrapnel, only to find that the doctors there had run out of the oxygen tanks needed to save her life.

In a video captured by local news station Yemen Youth TV, worried relatives carry her, still talking, to almost every clinic and hospital in the war-torn city of Taiz – none had any oxygen – until motionless and dead, she was finally taken to the morgue.

Once known as “Arabia Felix” or happy Arabia, Yemen has been disfigured by 10 months of war into one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, where over half the population faces hunger and not even hospitals are spared.

The wounded and the dying find little comfort in al-Thawra hospital in the southwestern city of Taiz: Pressure from nearby shelling has blown out all the windows and several direct hits have reduced one ward nearly to dust.

“Our situation is disastrous in every possible way,” said Sadeq Shujaa, head of the local doctor’s union.

“Shelling hit the only cancer hospital and the children’s hospital, shutting them down. The war has sent doctors fleeing for their lives to the countryside and siege tactics mean we have to smuggle in medicine through mountain passes.”

Taiz is contested between local militias and the armed Houthi group which many residents say blocks aid from entering and bombs civilian targets. It is one of the worst fronts of the war, in which forces loyal to a government ousted by the Houthis in March are seeking to fight back to the capital Sanaa.

After the government fled into exile, a Saudi-led alliance of Arab states joined the war to restore it, recapturing the port city of Aden where President Abd Rabbu Mansour al-Hadi is now based.

Riyadh and its allies have launched hundreds of air strikes, sent in ground troops and set up a naval blockade to restrict goods reaching the country. The Saudis say the Houthis, drawn mainly from a Shi’ite sect that ruled a thousand-year kingdom in north Yemen until 1962, are puppets of Shi’ite Iran.

The Houthis have allied themselves with army units loyal to long-serving former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and say they are leading a revolution against a corrupt government in thrall to the foreign invaders. They deny receiving support from Iran.

STAGGERING CRISIS

The fighting has killed around 6,000 people, about half of them civilians. Many times more are now in danger as a result of the humanitarian catastrophe wrought by the conflict.

The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) warns of a “staggering” food crisis, saying famine looms as over half the population or some 14.4 million people are food insecure.

“The economy shrank by 35 percent in 2015. People who used to have decent standards of living have become Yemen’s ‘new poor’ because with no electricity to power their business and no fuel to get anywhere, they have no way to earn money,” said Mohammed al-Assadi of UNICEF.

“2.4 million people are internally displaced. In these conditions there’s no easy access to basic hygiene or healthcare, and now about 320,000 children under five years old are severely malnourished,” he added.

On the outskirts of Sanaa and in towns outside Taiz, clusters of shabby tent encampments housing thousands of families fleeing nearby violence have cropped up, where jobless parents idle and many children shrivel with hunger.

In peacetime, impoverished Yemen imported 90 percent of its staple foods. Much of the 4 percent of the arid country that is arable land now lies untilled because of the war.

“Besides the humanitarian catastrophes, a lack of jobs paves the way for a social and political crisis in which work skills erode and some people join the war effort to earn a living, feeding a cycle of violence,” said Salah Elhajj Hassan of FAO.

HIDING IN CAVES

Workers from the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), among the few foreign aid groups operating in Yemen’s worst war zones, have suffered repeated attacks in the far northern province of Saada straddling the Saudi border.

An ambulance from an MSF-affiliated hospital rushed to the scene of a suspected Saudi-led air strike on Jan. 21, but just as crowds gathered to assist the victims another bomb fell and killed a medic.

An MSF hospital was bombed on Oct. 27 in what the Saudi-led coalition says was a strike intended to target militiamen nearby.

Brigadier General Ahmed al-Asseri, spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, said the foreign forces were working to reduce civilian deaths, but aid groups like MSF should prevent Houthi fighters from approaching their facilities.

As Yemeni society becomes increasingly militarized, combatants are often mixed among civilians. Rights group Human Rights Watch blamed Houthis for basing forces in a center for the blind in the capital that was bombed on Jan. 5.

The bomb did not explode, but rendered the facility unusable.

Days after the blast, a young boy with grey sightless eyes felt his way through the rubble and picked up a dead pigeon, in a moment captured by a local cameraman that has embodied for many Yemenis the sadness of the war.

Fear now reigns even where aid is available. MSF official Teresa Sancristoval said in a statement that most of the 40,000 residents in an area near an MSF hospital bombed on Jan. 10 now live in caves to avoid Saudi-led air strikes.

“Since the attack, there have been no deliveries in the maternity room – pregnant women are giving birth in caves rather than risk coming to the hospital,” she said.

(Editing by William Maclean and Peter Graff)

Food insecurity on the rise in South Sudan, Haiti

More than 6 million people in South Sudan and Haiti are facing food insecurity, United Nations agencies warned this week, including thousands who could soon face catastrophic shortages.

The World Food Programme (WFP) and two other U.N. groups issued the warning for South Sudan on Monday, saying that 4.8 million of the country’s residents are at risk of going hungry. That includes about 40,000 people who the agency warned “are on the brink of catastrophe.”

The WFP issued its own warning for Haiti on Tuesday, saying the El Nino weather pattern fueled a drought that has 3.6 million people facing food insecurity, double the total of six months ago.

In a joint statement, the WFP, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said the South Sudan situation was “particularly worrisome” because the country is about to enter its lean season, when food is the most scarce.

They warn about 1 in 4 people in South Sudan require urgent assistance.

A recent Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, a barometer for measuring food security, found 23 percent of South Sudan is at risk of “acute food and nutrition insecurity” in the first three months of this year. It said the majority of them live in the states of Unity, Jonglei and Upper Nile, where ongoing violent conflicts have forced many from their homes.

The report indicated there was “overwhelming evidence of a humanitarian emergency” in some areas, noting some people were eating water lilies, and warned the situation would likely worsen as water dried up in the coming weeks. The report could not confirm if parts of the country were already experiencing famine, as fighting prevented researchers from accessing certain areas.

The report said the country is also grappling with the effects of a drop in the value of its currency, which sent prices surging. It said the price of Sorghum, a cereal grain, increased 11-fold in a year.

The agencies said it was important they be given the chance to supply aid to those in need.

“Families have been doing everything they can to survive but they are now running out of options,” Jonathan Veitch, the UNICEF representative in South Sudan, said in a statement. “Many of the areas where the needs are greatest are out of reach because of the security situation. It’s crucial that we are given unrestricted access now. If we can reach them, we can help them.”

The WFP is also looking to help Haiti.

According to the organization, the country has seen three straight years of drought and an abnormally strong El Nino weather pattern is threatening to spoil the country’s next harvest.

El Nino occurs when part of the Pacific Ocean is warmer than usual, creating a ripple effect that brings atypical and sometimes extreme weather throughout the world. It’s been blamed for creating heavy flooding in some regions and droughts in others, both of which can spoil harvests.

The WFP said some parts of the country lost 70 percent of last year’s crops, and approximately 1.5 million Haitians are facing severe food insecurity. Others face malnutrition and hunger.

In southern Africa, an illusion built on aid heralds hope and hunger

LILONGWE (Reuters) – As she walks along a dirt road in central Malawi, Louise Abale carries her precious maize wrapped in a brightly coloured cloth and balanced on her head.

Because of drought in Malawi and across southern Africa the grain has doubled in price in the space of a year, and now costs around 200 kwacha ($0.28) a kilo.

Like many, Abale is struggling to pay for maize, a staple of the diet, and says her own – stunted – crop will not be ready for harvest for two months. “It’s too expensive, I have almost no money,” she said.

In all 2.8 million people in Malawi, or 17 percent of the population, now face hunger, according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

Drought and floods have hit the maize crop, exposing the fragility of gains which had seen Malawi’s rates of malnutrition slashed in the past two decades.

That progress was partly rooted in a fertilizer grant for small-scale farmers. But now the government, starved of donor funds following a graft scandal over two years ago, can ill afford such payments and says it must scale down the program.

Ironically, policies aimed at ensuring basic food security are partly to blame for a cycle of rural poverty and aid dependency in this land-locked African nation, leaving the population vulnerable to climate shocks, economists say.

“There is no doubt that the fertilizer subsidy was only feasible due to donor support,” said Ed Hobey, an analyst at Africa Risk Consulting. “At best, it was unsustainable without continued donor support, at worst, it was an illusion built on aid.”

Launched in 2005, the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) provides qualifying farmers – those with limited income but a plot of productive land – with two coupons which can be redeemed for two 50-kg bags of fertilizer. The recipients make a modest contribution, with the government footing most of the bill.

Because the government is subsidizing the production of maize – the main source of calories for many poor households – it also bans the export of the grain.

The program is credited by the government and some aid agencies with lifting maize production and cutting hunger.

The data appear to back that up.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the percentage of Malawi’s malnourished population fell to 21.8 percent in 2012-14 from 45 percent two decades earlier.

But FISP’s role here is difficult to untangle as most of those gains were made before 2005. Still, there is evidence of benefits, including indirect ones.

Stunting among Malawi children – a key nutrition measure – fell to 42.4 percent in 2014 from 49 percent in 2002.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

But the program has also had unintended consequences.

The focus on food security, including the ban on maize exports, has discouraged investment in more productive commercial farming methods.

“Our concern with the export ban is that it limits the scope to expand production among more medium and large-scale farms if they are unable to market the surplus,” said Richard Record, World Bank Senior Country Economist, World Bank in Malawi.

In the long run such a ban stunts food production, especially in an age of increasingly high-tech farming, economists say.

FISP also diverted state funds from other areas.

In all, FISP has accounted for as much as 9 percent of government expenditure and over half the agricultural budget, leaving scant funds to invest in rural transport links and other projects that would benefit the countryside.

“The FISP was not matched by increased investment in rural infrastructure especially roads and irrigation,” said Hobey of Africa Risk Consulting.

This retards development of other sectors in the farm value chain, such as canning, which can kick-start industrialization, economists and analysts say.

Initially FISP met its objective: providing calories to the rural poor. Between 2007 and 2014 Malawi produced bumper maize crops, with surpluses recorded since 2007 – until last year.

A study in the “The American Journal of Agricultural Economics” found a 15 percent boost in maize production under FISP coincided with a 15 percent decrease in the amount of land devoted to the grain.

This suggests small-scale farmers diversified to cash crops such as tobacco and cotton.

DONOR DROUGHT DRAINS FISP COFFERS

Today FISP is no longer viable, government officials and analysts say.

Donor funds for the budget have dried up in the wake of a scandal over two years ago dubbed “cashgate”, in which state officials siphoned millions of dollars.

“We are going to have to be scaling down expenditure on FISP, we are reacting to diminishing resources of funds for the budget,” Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe told Reuters.

Belt tightening is underway, though the number of FISP recipients has remained unchanged at 1.5 million.

Instead of paying 500 Malawian kwacha ($0.70) toward the two 50 kg bags of fertilizer subsidised, Gondwe said farmers would now pay 3,500 kwacha. The cost of a bag is around 20,000 kwacha.

Several subsistence farmers interviewed by Reuters in their fields said they could not afford the 3,500 kwacha, let alone the full cost.

The price for fertilizer has surged as it is imported and the kwacha has been sliding against the dollar, losing 63 percent in the past 12 months.

Gondwe said the program this financial year would cost 54 billion kwacha instead of an original estimate of 40 billion, plus an additional 8 billion rand for seeds.

INDIVIDUAL SUCCESSES

To be sure, FISP has helped individual farmers, such as Salome Banda. Five years ago, Banda made the transition from subsistence farming to producing a surplus of maize for market because she received the grant once.

“I have not had it since 2010 but I can buy my own fertilizer now,” she told Reuters as she stood proudly by 50 kg bags of her maize stacked in a warehouse north of Lilongwe. She said one FISP grant tripled her production that season.

For others, the benefits have not translated into such gains and even Banda, while she produces surpluses, has hardly made the leap to more productive, technical farming.

“When I got FISP, I fed all my children,” said Matezenji Watsoni, a 35-year-old mother of seven, as she waited outside a World Food Programme relief station in a rural Lilongwe suburb for a 50 kg bag of maize.

“But this is the third year I have not had it, and it has brought hunger to my house,” she said.

This year a perfect storm is brewing after a decade of maize surpluses turned into a deficit of 225,000 tonnes in 2015, in a country that consumes 3 million tonnes annually. The harvest this season looks set to be even worse.

RURAL TILL THE COWS COME HOME

Another unintended outcome of the FISP is that by subsidizing peasant farming, people have an incentive to remain on the land, adding to rural population pressures.

Late rains have clothed central regions in simmering shades of green but this idyllic image belies the late start to the summer planting season and the grinding poverty of rain-fed, hand tilled agriculture.

Malawi, which has done little to industrialize, is also barely urban. In 1990, 88 percent of the population was rural, a number that was 84 percent in 2014, according to World Bank data. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is 63 percent rural.

Asked about industrialization, finance minister Gondwe, a jovial septuagenarian, looked almost bemused.

“It will take time to industrialize. But don’t forget this country cannot even make a needle. So to base your policy on that probably is asking too much.”

(Additional reporting by Eldson Chagara; Editing by James Macharia and Janet McBride)