Food situation remains critical for rural poor

The Zambian government's Disaster Management Unit is "doing its best" to cope with the country's food crisis, but the situation remains dire for Zambian villagers in affected rural areas.

"The government is doing its best together with its operating partners. WFP [World Food Programme] and ourselves are mobilising resources and we're working at a faster pace to move food [to affected areas]," Jones Mwanza, the head of the disaster unit told IRIN on Tuesday.

Zambia has a projected maize deficit of around 626,000 mt until April next year. According to WFP and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) figures, commercial imports are projected at 351,000 mt, with the remaining shortfall of 275,000 mt to be covered by the government and donor aid.

Over 2.3 million people are in need of food aid, or 21 percent of Zambians, as a result of excessive rains last year and drought this year. The most affected region is the Southern Province, where an estimated 60 percent of the population require assistance.

World Vision, one of the NGOs contracted by the government and WFP for food distributions in the Southern Province, is helping to provide every registered "vulnerable" person with 350g of maize kernels per day. The average villager not on the programme is only able to find enough food for a meal every second or third day, the agency said.

"The situation is still quite critical. The drought has not made it possible for anybody to have a meaningful crop ... and by September everything [from the current harvest] will have run out," said World Vision communications manager Charles Kachikoti.

Villagers have been forced to resort to collecting wild fruit, which is dried and ground to produce a flour. World Vision reported people in the Southern Province as saying that things have never been so bad.

Kachikoti told IRIN that the situation had been compounded by outbreaks of swine fever and corridor disease, that killed off livestock and deepened people's vulnerability in an already impoverished region.

"With no more viable sources of income, villagers cannot afford to go to local shops to purchase their maize meal, which is, in contrast to other Southern African nations, still freely available. However, like everywhere else in Southern Africa, prices for the staple food maize, have increased by more than 200 percent in the last year and is therefore now out of reach for most Zambians," a World Vision statement said.

Since 1991, the agriculture-dependant Southern Province has experienced on-going food shortages, with little or no rains alternating with floods.

The lack of infrastructure - from feeder roads to government extension services - and the inability of the private sector to fill a gap vacated by the state under agricultural reforms, has exacerbated food insecurity, analysts told IRIN.