Food aid agencies seek to consolidate gains

Malawi has mostly recovered from last year's food crisis that at its height threatened 3.3 million people, but a large vulnerable population still needs humanitarian aid. World Food Programme (WFP) head of programmes in Malawi, Lola Castro, said her agency was planning to feed about 670,000 people through targeted distributions to identified vulnerable groups from July 2003 to June 2004. WFP was assisting malnourished children, pregnant and lactating women, primary school children in food-insecure areas, people living with HIV/AIDS and the chronically ill with food aid. Food-insecure communities were being assisted either with food-for-work or food-for-training projects. Castro stressed that "the 670,000 [beneficiaries] is the total number of people who will receive food over the 12 months" of the WFP's emergency operation. The highest monthly number of beneficiaries targeted would be "around 450,000 in January and February, which are normally the worst months - just before the harvest, when households have depleted all their [food] stocks. Malnutrition increases as well during those months," she told IRIN. Castro remarked that the number of WFP beneficiaries was not the total number of people in need of aid in Malawi. "This is the total number [of people] that we will assist, but there has been talk of about 200,000 households in flood- and drought-affected areas [needing aid]. Of course, there are other [aid] pipelines that will distribute food to other vulnerable people [not on WFP's list]," Castro explained. "But we are making sure that we will not duplicate food aid [distributions] with other agencies like [the Southern Africa Food Security Emergency] C-SAFE - we have made sure that the same people do not benefit from both [aid] pipelines," Castro added. C-SAFE monitoring and evaluation officer Michka Seroussi told IRIN that the organisation's implementing partners in Malawi had "reached about 93,783 beneficiaries over the three months of May, June and July". Like WFP, C-SAFE was targeting vulnerable groups and focussing on programmes that would assist in making Malawi's partial recovery sustainable. C-SAFE's targeted assistance began in earnest during January this year, she added. "The situation is better in Malawi than last year. [Among our] objectives is restoring the livelihood systems in the countries C-SAFE is operational in, and trying to increase and maintain productive output, and developing activities to improve resilience to shocks," Seroussi noted.