Food shortage threatens 60,000 - FEWS Net

At least 60,000 Mauritanians face serious imminent food shortages, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) reported on Thursday. The problem was particularly keen in the southern enclave of Aftout, which has suffered six successive poor harvests, it said. Mauritania is facing a cereal deficit of 205,000 mt, equivalent to five months' cereal consumption needs, primarily because of extremely poor rains, according to the report. The cereals include millet, sorghum and maize. "In addition, freak rain storms from 9-11 January caused the death of 120,000 cattle, sheep and goats; destruction of 25 percent of already harvested crops; and loss of lives and property," FEWS Net said. "The rains ruined pasture land for the animals that survived," the report added. In Aftout, crop production was sufficient to meet only two months' needs, FEWS Net warned. Households in the Senegal River valley and pastoral districts of Trarza region were hardest hit by the loss of livestock, it said. Extremely impoverished Haratin villagers in southern Hodh el Chargui and Hodh el Gharbi were in similar conditions, and many had left for Mali, the report stated. "Conditions have pushed some 16,000 farmers in the two Hodhs and 46,000 farmers and herders in the Senegal River Valley and Aftout into the extremely food insecure category - now or soon unable to meet their consumption needs, having already exhausted their strategies for acquiring food - and facing imminent famine," FEWS Net warned. "Evidence of malnutrition abounds in the form of exhaustion and loss of weight, night blindness, scurvy, dehydration and diarrhoea- and hunger-related deaths," it added. The FEWS Net report followed an urgent appeal by the Mauritanian government on 1 September, when it called for assistance to provide 38,000 mt of grain and 14,000 mt of complementary materials to meet the needs of desperate people for about three months. In launching the appeal, Minister of the Interior, Posts and Telecommunications, Lemrabet Sidi Mahmoud Ould Cheikh Ahmed, said nothing was expected from the country's farm lands, since most of them depended on rainfall. Rain-fed agriculture accounts for about one third of Mauritania's annual cereal production, and low-lying areas behind dams contribute a sixth of production. Most of the low-lying areas have been dry this year. Details of the FEWS Net report and related documents.