UN agency makes food appeal for 1 million people

UN World Food Programme (WFP) appealed on Monday for 44,000 mt of food to help feed at least a million Burundians until the main harvest in April 2003. The agency said that the rains having been affected by a two-month delay combined with a poor harvest from the previous growing season could "by as early as this month" cause the number of people needing relief aid to rise from 580,000 to 1.2 million. "The situation has become alarming, and the international community needs to step forward urgently," Mustapha Darboe, the WFP country director and representative in Burundi, said in Bujumbura. WFP, which describes itself as the UN's frontline agency in the fight against global hunger, said it was also "trying to cope with the current influx of Congolese refugees, which has reached about 14,000 people". Burundi is facing an outbreak of malaria that could, the WFP said, "prey on a hungry, weakened population". In 2002, it said, some 600,000 people "were caught" in a malaria epidemic while thousands others battled a severe drought. The WFP said the food situation could worsen if fighting continued and major population displacements occurred. So far, it said, the provinces most affected by the fighting were Ruyigi, Gitega, Bubanza, Muramvya and Bujumbura Rural. WFP made this assessment a day before Burundi's main rebel faction and the transitional government signed a ceasefire in Arusha, Tanzania. In October, Burundi's Early Warning Task Force reported that the delayed rains could lead to lower yields from the December harvest. Poor rainfall had also caused a fall in the water table in the agricultural swamplands "to perilously low" levels. Cultivation in these areas usually began in December in preparation for the April harvest, WFP said. Reduced food production would put "additional pressure" on already overstretched food-aid resources, which, WFP said, would begin happening in December if donor contributions were not made available quickly. "We are starting to distribute food aid to the worst-affected areas early enough to contain the crisis, but if we don't get more pledges quickly, relief stocks will run out and the situation will deteriorate rapidly," Darboe said.