President appeals to donors

President Bingu wa Mutharika has made a special appeal to donors to support humanitarian operations in Malawi, where more than a million people will need food aid until March 2005. World Food Programme (WFP) spokeswoman Antonella D'Aprile told IRIN on Thursday that the agency had attended the president's recent meeting with donors. "He asked donors to support the humanitarian pipeline, in cash or in kind, because of the food insecurity situation in Malawi, and the donors are already reacting." WFP made them aware that "our [food aid] pipeline would break in October if we did not get donors on our side". The agency plans to feed 1.1 million Malawians due to poor harvests, mainly in the south and centre of the country, on top of a caseload of some 170,000 chronically poor and food insecure people. Malawi's Secretary for Poverty and Commissioner for Disaster Management Affairs, Randson Mwadiwa, told IRIN on Monday that an estimated 1.3 million to 1.6 million people would need food aid up to March 2005. He said the government planned to import 70,000 mt of maize, which would be made available in local markets. "The country did not produce enough maize, so moving maize from the north [where production was good] to the south [which experienced widespread crop failures] will not solve the problem. That maize will have to come from outside the country," Mwadiwa added. Such imports could contain price increases in the staple. Mwadiwa said that despite government plans to import maize, humanitarian assistance would still be needed. D'Aprile noted that while maize could be made available in the country's markets through commercial and government imports, this did not necessarily mean people could afford the staple food. "We are talking about access - even if you make maize available in commercial markets, it does not mean 1.1 million people can buy the maize and eat it at home. WFP is taking care of those people whose purchasing power is very low." Two food security reports, one by the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee and another compiled jointly by WFP and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, have indicated that some 56,000 mt of cereals will be required to assist those in need. D'Aprile warned: "They were also making an assumption that the maize price is not going to be more than Kwacha 27 [US $0.25] per kilogram. If the maize price is going to climb higher then we are going to be moving into a worse scenario than the one just described."