FAO announces largest programme in Africa

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said on Friday that almost 2 million Angolans would receive much needed agricultural emergency assistance ahead of the rainy season. Over the next few weeks "FAO will provide agricultural kits to farmers in 14 of the 18 provinces in Angola. The kits will include locally adapted varieties of maize, beans, vegetable, millet and sorghum seeds, and agricultural tools such as hoes and machetes," the organisation said in a statement. Other humanitarian organisations working in the country would provide "an additional 300,000 [agricultural] kits, the total will be some 600,000 kits". In what the organisation said was its largest operation in Africa, about 5,000 mt of inputs will be distributed to "the most remote and isolated villages, where pockets of extreme vulnerability still exist". "Through this assistance, farmers and their families will be able to cultivate their land and produce food for several months," FAO's Emergency Coordinator in Angola, Marco Giovannoni, was quoted as saying. Angola's recent emergence from decades of civil war has allowed aid agencies to gain a more complete understanding of the vast challenges ahead. "After three decades of war and a year and a half of peace, Angolans have started to clear their abandoned lands, to replant their fields and to build more durable houses than the shelters which millions of people were forced to live in during the war. The government has said that some 3.3 million formerly displaced people have already been resettled, and that many others - including a significant number of former [rebel] UNITA soldiers, who have now been demobilised - have already returned to their homes, before the start of the rainy season in September," the FAO said. From January 2004 onwards, FAO and its partners will distribute 50,000 agricultural kits to demobilised former UNITA soldiers, using funds donated by the World Bank. Giovannoni added that "the return of farmers to their villages has been a phenomenon on an enormous scale". "There is a great sense of relief that the war is over, but daily life remains difficult for the vast majority of Angolan people. The supply of seeds and tools is an essential contribution to improve the living conditions, food security and self-reliance of people in rural areas," he noted. Agricultural households in Angola still faced a number of challenges, including infrastructure problems and providing surplus food for their families. "National and domestic seed production in the country is limited, and purchasing imported seeds often increases local food prices, to the detriment of already economically fragile rural households," the FAO explained. To help offset this structural deficiency, FAO said it was supporting seed multiplication programmes in villages, which would help families to reduce their dependence on emergency assistance and humanitarian aid and move towards self-sustenance and -reliance. In addition, FAO announced that it would support the rehabilitation of livestock herds in Angola, which were decimated by the 27-year-long war. The organisation said Italy, Japan, Norway, Sweden and the European Union, as well as the UN Development Programme, the World Bank, the UN High Commission for Refugees and the United States Agency for International Development had contributed US $11.3 million to FAO's emergency projects in Angola.