Below normal harvest expected

Food production in Swaziland is expected to be about 56 percent of normal output, further exacerbating the country's current food shortages. World Food Programme (WFP) emergency coordinator in Swaziland, Sarah Laughton, told IRIN on Wednesday that "the picture we have is that it's definitely not a great harvest situation for Swaziland". The tiny kingdom is one of six southern African countries experiencing food shortages due to drought and the impact of HIV/AIDS. The kingdom's national disaster task team has estimated that 297,000 out a population of 1 million Swazis will require food aid to survive this year. "In mid-March we ran a review of the food security situation ... and the picture we got was that a fairly good harvest was expected in the Highveld area, about 90 percent of normal. In the Middleveld it is expected that the harvest will be about 65 percent of normal. "What came as a real shock was that production in the Lowveld region was expected to be between 0 and 10 percent of normal, so that's nearly crop failure. In the Lubombo plateau we are expecting 30 percent of normal production. These are all Ministry of Agriculture figures," Laughton said. On the positive side, maize prices had dropped. "This will help a lot of people," she added. Maize prices were at 180 percent of normal over the past few months. The Times of Swaziland quoted national disaster task team chairman, Ben Nsibandze, as saying that the crisis in the country required the assistance of the international community beyond the current WFP emergency operation (EMOP), which was scheduled to end on 30 June. Factors exacerbating the current crisis were that more than 60 percent of the population lived below the poverty datum line, and HIV/AIDS was ravaging the country. "We see as a result of all this, a poverty, hunger and disease situation that is progressively getting worse, as victims are deprived of all their coping mechanisms. We see the Swazi extended family structure collapsing as a result of family members failing to take care of their infected and affected relatives. We see an increase in child-headed families, large numbers of orphans cared for by elderly and sometimes destitute grandparents, chronic malnutrition, children being taken out of school because of the absence of financial means to support them through," the Times quoted Nsibandze as saying. Laughton said WFP would scale down its operations during the harvest months. "We are continuing distributions during the harvest period - April, May and June - but only in the most affected areas, [to] reduced numbers [of beneficiaries]. Up to now [WFP had been feeding] about 265,000. Figures from now will be about 152,000 [receiving WFP rations]." However, WFP would not stop its assistance to Swaziland once the current EMOP ends. "What's being planned now is a new [regional] EMOP that would include Swaziland. The next step is a new crop and food assessment mission, to be conducted jointly by WFP and FAO [Food and Agriculture Organisation] in Swaziland in late April and early May. That helps us establish what the need is for food aid for the coming year. I think there's no doubt at all there'll be continued assistance in Swaziland after June," Laughton noted. A vulnerability assessment examining a range of factors that affect food security, such as household incomes, would also be done in April and May. "We should have results for both [the vulnerability assessment and crop and food assessment] around the same time... [but] from the mid-March review it was obvious there was a dramatic reduction of the actual areas being cultivated," Laughton added. This pointed to another bad year for Swazis' food security.