IDP food situation “extremely serious”

The food and health situation of internally-displaced people (IDPs) in Burundi was “extremely serious”, a joint FAO/WFP mission to 12 provinces of the country reported on Thursday. “Living conditions in these sites are poor, with no clean water, shelter and sanitary facilities,” the report said of IDP camps in the country. IDPs’ access to land was restricted, and they could not work normally because of long distances to reach their fields and the threat of theft, it added. “While plots around the camps have been distributed by the local authorities, they are, nonetheless, of a limited size and their production alone would be inadequate to meet the needs of the camp populations,” the mission team stated.

The destruction and lack of maintenance of social infrastructure has had a devastating impact on the provision of basic social services, resulting in a diminished access to clean water and a substantially deteriorated state of health, as well as decreased opportunities for education, according to the report. “Opportunities to earn minimum life-sustaining revenue are increasingly rare, both in the private and public sectors of the swiftly deteriorating national economy,” it said.