UN agencies warn of looming food crisis

A serious food crisis is looming in the northern and eastern provinces of Burundi, a consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Thursday. "The lean season will be longer than normal," Méthode Niyongendako, the consultant, said in Bujumbura, the nation's capital. The lean season usually runs from September to December but this year it started in August and is not expected to end until late January or in February, according to the November issue of the FAO bulletin Système d’Alerte Précoce, Surveillance de la Securite Alimentaire. Rural populations are already facing food shortages because the previous harvest in June was also poor and food started running out in August, a month earlier than usual. Low rainfall is a leading cause of the problem, Niyongendako said. Rains that were expected in September only started to fall recently and villagers in some provinces are only beginning to sow now. Burundi's eastern provinces have had poor rain three years in a row. Another cause of the food crisis is the mosaic virus that has decimated cassava. The FAO's deputy emergency coordinator in Burundi, Alexander Huynth, said the food crisis was likely to get worst in the densely populated north provinces because that area had been worst hit by the virus. Also a 78-percent drop in coffee production has reduced farmers' incomes. A programme officer for the UN World Food Programme (WFP), Guillaume Foliot, said on Thursday Burundi had a food deficit of 334,000 tonnes in 2005 compared to 254,000 tonnes in 2004. The agency had been distributing up to 7,000 tonnes of food a month but is now preparing to increase it to 8,000 tonnes. The governor of Ngozi Province, Niragira Felix, told a local radio station on Tuesday that one person had died of hunger in Gashikanwa Commune and that 20 families had fled their homes in the area in search of food. He and other government officials in the north called the looming crisis a "famine", but Foliot said: "Some patients die in nutritional centres almost every day, and in every single province of the country, this is a fact throughout the year. "Causes of deaths are multiple and complex. The very limited access to health care, combined with extreme poverty explains that people arrive in nutritional centres often very sick and in a terrible state. Sometimes they pass away. This does not mean there is a famine."