Need for food security vigilance, FEWS says

Burkina Faso's national emergency contingency committee, or CONASUR, needs to plan to deal with likely food insecurity in the country and provide aid where needed, the USAID's FEWS network reported on 2 April.

In its report on the country's state of food security from mid-February to mid-March, FEWS said that despite generally satisfactory access to food nationwide, there were "significant exceptions". Parts of Centre Plateau (Oubritenga, Kourweogo, Ganzourgou), the North (Passore, Yatenga), and Centre North (Sanmatenga, Namentenga), experienced their second worst harvest in a row.

Many low-income farming families in Centre Plateau, the North, Centre North, and Sahel regions may be unable, FEWS reported, to have enough food in the next three to four months. "Rural household who experienced their second crop failure in a row may not have enough grain to eat, let alone plant, when the rainy season begins in May/June," FEWS reported.

NASA satellite imagery, it added, had shown that dry-season bush fires had destroyed large tracts of land. Bushfires - sometimes caused deliberately - destroy grazing and wooded lands, and reduce soil productivity. In the Sahel, the phenomenon contributes to desertification. Burkina Faso, which lies in the Sahel, continued to lose "large areas" of forests and shrubs to bush fires each year, FEWS said.

"Clearly, efforts are urgently needed to raise public awareness about the adverse impact of bush fires and to enlist public support in fighting them," it reported.

[For the full FEWS reports see http://www.fews.net/]