Thousands face food shortages

Thousands of people in Cape Verde have been hit by food shortages due in part to poor harvests, according to UN agencies which have begun channelling aid to the affected populations. The World Food Programme (WFP) has approved an immediate emergency response operation to the sum of US $199,000 to provide 556 mt of maize to some 30,000 people, WFP Country Director Sonsoles Ruedas told IRIN on Thursday from the Cape Verdean capital, Praia. Ruedas said WFP was preparing a bigger operation worth some US $1.2 million. The targeted beneficiaries of WFP's assistance are vulnerable groups such as the elderly, the handicapped and female heads of households, she said. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Country Director Arlindo Braganca Gomes said his organisation was providing seeds - 60 mt of maize, 52 mt of beans - and small farming tools to some 14,000 families [over 80,000 people], under a US $229,000 agreement signed last week with the Cape Verdean government. The project covers 13 of the country's 17 districts. Cape Verde, a semi-arid archipelago of 435,000 people off the coast of West Africa, has a structural food deficit. The rains it receives are insufficient and irregular, yet most farming is rainfed and yields are poor. The country usually produces 10 to 20 percent of the cereals it needs each year, according to Gomes. As a result, it depends heavily on imported food. The poor people in rural areas usually receive assistance from the government through state-financed poverty alleviation structures called FAIMOs (Portuguese acronym). Beneficiaries work on projects in their communities such as building roads and planting trees, and are paid the minimum wage. This, along with some subsistence agriculture, helps them to cover their food needs, Ruedas told IRIN. However, cereal harvests in 2000/2001 and 2001/2002 were about half that of 1999/2000. Moreover, because of financial difficulties, the government was this year unable to fund the FAIMOs to the extent necessary. People's coping mechanisms were thus reduced. Many have consumed the grain they would normally have kept for planting, Ruedas said, and some have been reduced to eating one or two meals a day instead of three.