Focus shifts to recovery programmes

The Zambian government says the country has produced enough food to feed itself this year and has not appealed for relief aid. The official Zambia News Agency (ZNA) reported Minister of Agriculture Mundia Sikatana as saying the country had about 120,000 mt of surplus maize which could be exported to neighbouring countries. Zambia produced 1.2 million mt of maize during the 2002/03 farming season - double the quantity in the previous year. The poor harvest in 2001/02 saw widespread food shortages, with millions of Zambians relying on food aid to survive. The ZNA reported that with this winter's production and another 100,000 mt of maize in stock from imports last year, Sikatana said the country's total maize stock stood at 1.3 million mt. Zambia's annual domestic consumption requirement is an estimated 1.2 million mt. Elizabeth Phiri, permanent secretary in charge of cooperatives and marketing in the Ministry of Agriculture, told IRIN on Wednesday that the details around the use of the surplus stock were still being finalised. "We are still working out [how much will be kept in reserve and how much will be exported], but definitely we will keep something as strategic reserve. In terms of food needs, we have enough to feed ourselves. Some places in Zambia did not do very well [in crop production] because of drought or floods. So it's a question of moving [surplus], redistributing from areas where we had good yields to areas of need," she said. The government had not appealed for relief aid this year. "We have not [issued an appeal], other than just requesting that NGOs and the private sector can assist [us] in moving food from production areas to [food] deficit areas," Phiri added. WFP Zambia representative Richard Ragan told IRIN that the "government has requested assistance that will focus on recovery activities and assistance to vulnerable groups, in particular orphans and vulnerable children. They've not requested emergency assistance or relief aid [for general distributions]." WFP had begun a targeted food-for-work programme directed towards 50,000 farming families on 1 July. "We'll partner with FAO [UN Food and Agriculture Organisation] and WFP will provide the food for the work, while FAO will provide the other inputs, seeds and tools. Additionally we'll target around 200,000 vulnerable children. These children are orphans who have primarily been affected by HIV... it's a programme [involving] around 48,000 mt of food," Ragan added. He said there were still small pockets of need, but the "government is claiming they will be able to provide that food from their stocks". Ragan warned, however, that the issue was "not the fact that they produced enough food, but [people's] access to food". "You have people living in this country who, for the past two years, have been trying to cope with disaster. As a result they've sold much of their household assets and we're trying to help them recover. What we see this year is a recovery programme which might lead into [another] recovery programme next year," Ragan concluded.