More than a million need food assistance

More than a million Angolans are likely to need immediate food assistance until April, according to a World Food Programme (WFP) report. The recently released preliminary results of WFP's Vulnerability Analysis (VA), covering the period May to October 2003, indicated that more than 500,000 people, including displaced Angolans who have no source of income, are currently food insecure and in need of immediate assistance. A WFP official in Angola, Ermelinda Caliengue, told IRIN that 1.2 million Angolans had been identified as "highly vulnerable to food insecurity", and their situation was likely to become critical during the "lean period" from November 2003 to April 2004. She said the largest concentration of affected people were in the central and southern maize-based farming areas in the provinces of Huambo, Bie, Benguela and Moxico. "Most of these people are displaced or recently resettled Angolans," she added. In the province of Moxico, those affected were mainly resettled Angolan refugees who had returned from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia after peace was declared in 2002, while in the remaining three provinces they were people displaced internally during almost 30 years of civil war. According to the VA, "moderate levels of food insecurity were found in the northern provinces, where cassava is the main staple crop." Caliengue said the WFP had been providing food assistance in all the affected areas for a period of more than six months, while the Food and Agriculture Organisation was providing seed and tools, and the government was assisting with health care services.