Refugees face severe food shortages

The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) said that unless donor finance is rapidly forthcoming, it could not continue feeding 84,000 refugees in Zambia. "The next two weeks are crucial," WFP Deputy Country Director in Zambia, Jorge Fanlo, told IRIN on Tuesday. "Unless we get lots of pledges very soon, we'll run out of food by mid-April," he said. Last month WFP appealed for US $2.6 million to continue feeding some 84,000 refugees in Zambia who have fled fighting in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)."Donor response to that appeal was very poor," WFP spokesperson Jennifer Abrahamson told IRIN. A massive shortage of basic food commodities such as maize and beans has already hit six Zambian refugee camps. "We're already looking at a 25 percent ration cut when we start our next feeding cycle on Thursday," Fanlo said. This ration cut would probably be increased to fifty percent by the beginning of April, he added. Once donor pledges are made it typically takes three to four weeks to translate the money into food at the refugee camps. Intensified fighting in Angola and DRC has led to an increased flow of people seeking refuge across their respective borders and into western and northern Zambia. Recent armed offensives by rebels and their supporters in DRC’s Katanga province, and their capture of Pweto, Moba and Malilo, resulted in some 15,000 people entering Zambia’s Luapula and Northern provinces in November and December alone. "The flood of refugees into Zambia stopped just before we reached a real crisis point," said Fanlo. "But if hostilities erupt again along our borders with Angola or DRC, we could see another burst of refugees who we can simply not feed." Refugees who flee to Zambia typically arrive weak and exhausted. A combination of malaria which is widespread in the camps, and low food intake can lead to severe malnutrition. While supplementary feeding programs have helped reduce malnutrition amongst the refugees in camps such as Kala, health conditions could deteriorate if more food doesn’t arrive soon to sustain these programmes. Additional challenges currently being faced in assisting the refugees are the abnormally heavy rains in the region that have left thousands homeless in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia, and which make transport of food difficult. Western province’s Mayukwayukwa and Nangweshi camps, which host more than 26,000 Angolan refugees, are at risk of being inaccessible as road conditions continue to deteriorate. WFP said that it was urgent that food be moved to the region in case the situation deteriorates. Zambia has maintained an open-door policy towards refugees and asylum-seekers since the 1970s. Roughly 260,000 refugees are within Zambia’s borders. President Frederick Chiluba recently called on the international community to do more to assist refugees in Zambia. "The mere presence of refugees on any territory impacts on the local resources of the host country and the task is daunting for a developing nation like Zambia which has competing development problems in the face of limited resources," Chiluba said at a press conference last December. The 40,000 recently-arrived refugees are being fed through WFP’s emergency operation. Another 42,000 who arrived as early as October 1999 are receiving assistance through the agency’s protracted relief and recovery operation. Both operations are now severely underfunded. Due to successive influxes, WFP has been forced to stretch its food resources to cover a greater refugee caseload than was originally foreseen.