Donations from Germany, Spain for drought-affected people

Germany and Spain have donated US $490,000 and $366,000 respectively to support the UN World Food Programme's (WFP) response to food shortages in Mauritania, WFP reported on Monday. The contributions, WFP said, would be used to purchase emergency food rations to help feed hundreds of thousands of people who have been affected by two years of drought. "Farming communities across Mauritania face bleak prospects until the next harvest in November 2003," WFP said. "The Aftout region in particular, has been severely affected by poor harvest. A freak storm in January killed tens of thousands of livestock on which households depend for the hungry season." Farmers' stocks were exhausted and cereal prices had risen 100 percent since 2000, the agency reported. People in most rural areas were barely getting by, food was generally scarce in rural markets and evidence of malnutrition abounded in the form of exhaustion and loss of weight. There were also cases of night blindness, dehydration and diarrhoea. At least 250,000 Mauritanians were threatened by serious food shortages and relied on WFP's under-funded emergency operations for food, the UN agency said. It added that at least 700,000 of Mauritania's 2.7 million people were food insecure and could soon face starvation. In September, the government of Mauritania declared an emergency and appealed for 37,000 mt cereals and 14,000 mt of complementary foods to meet emergency needs. WFP, which had launched a US $7.5 million appeal six months earlier, has received 37 percent of needed resources from Germany, Spain, Finland, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. In October, the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) reported that Mauritania's food security situation remained worrying despite a slight improvement in rainfall. The rainfall, it said, not enough to offest the impact of months of drought because farming relied mostly on irrigation.