n the heels of a two-week mission to southern Africa, the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Humanitarian Needs, James T. Morris, announced that an additional 1.6 million people in the region are in urgent need of food aid and other humanitarian assistance over the next seven months. Citing the preliminary findings of an emergency food needs assessment, which began in mid-August,
coordinated by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), he said the number of people who will suffer food shortages ahead of next year’s harvest has now risen from 12.8 million in May, to 14.4 million.
A moderate drought is enough to alter the delicate production and sale of maize on behalf of a small family; and furthermore, this land has been impoverished, for over 20 years there has been no crop rotation.
"These new figures confirm what the team and I witnessed during our mission: the humanitarian crisis is not only devastatingly real, it is also worsening faster than was originally projected. This crisis must be an absolute top priority for the international community," said Morris, who led a team of technical experts involved in responding to the disaster. Limited supplies of maize - and people’s access to it - are mainly responsible for the increased numbers. Imports of food, both commercial and humanitarian relief, have been lower than originally projected, causing prices to soar across the board. Policy impediments on critical issues such as market liberalization and land reform are leading to greater food insecurity, and are yet to be resolved by governments.
Underlying the food crisis is the untold tragedy of families who are being destroyed by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The mission witnessed repeated cases of elderly grandparents caring for innumerable children and orphans. The pandemic is causing the number of orphans to rise dramatically to 4.2 million in the six countries, according to UNICEF statistics. Across the six countries visited, healthcare workers universally emphasized the lethal combination of hunger and HIV -- how the convergence of the two calamities sharply increase people’s vulnerability to infection and disease. “This is a very, very different crisis than anything we’ve seen before -- HIV/AIDS is laying siege to entire communities, decimating the workforce and putting an even heavier strain on already over-burdened and weak healthcare systems,” said Morris. In every country visited, the Special Envoy’s team was confronted by a devastating mix of extreme hunger and severe shortcomings in agriculture, health, sanitation and institutional capacity.
“It is a serious situation – declared Father Luigi Casagrande, Father Superior of the Comboni Fathers of the Zambia-Malawi province – at the moment there is a great lack of food even if we are not yet facing the feared famine. The foreigners that come here ask themselves where the ‘famine problem’ is”. But according to Father Casagrande, at least in reference to the situation in Malawi, it is not only a climatic factor: “We face the total absence of an agricultural policy, there are neighboring countries, such as South Africa and Zambia, that have all the interest in transforming Malawi from a country that produces to a country that buys maize and wheat and the local government keeps quite”.
To not underestimate, however, the atmospheric and geophysics of the events: “A moderate drought is enough to alter the delicate production and sale of maize on behalf of a small family – observes Father Casagrande – and furthermore, this land has been impoverished, for over 20 years there has been no crop rotation. Without forgetting that most of the trees have been cut down to obtain fire wood and the land is not fertile”. Prospects for next year’s harvest are bleak unless small-scale farmers immediately receive adequate supplies of seeds and fertilizer in time for the planting season, just one month away. Without investment in agriculture, the region cannot hope to stabilize, let alone regain food security. And the effects of an ever-likely El Nino impact have not yet been factored in. In mid-July, the United Nations requested US$611 million in food and non-food support for southern Africa. To date, WFP has confirmed 36 percent of the US$507 million for food aid, and is confident about an additional 30 percent under a final stage of negotiations. On the non-food side, however, only US$12 million has been pledged. Without the needed non-food support, the risk of disease outbreak and a prolongation of the crisis will be inevitable. “The needs are immense and immediate, and we are working very hard to secure the rest. Failure to address all of the needs now will only extend this crisis,” said Morris.
(From MISNA)