FAO announces $10 million food security plan

The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has announced details of a US $10 million plan to launch and implement six pivotal projects to control malnutrition and maintain a stable food supply in the face of war and massive population displacement, as well as to contain the renewed threat of cassava disease. The prolonged presence of internally displaced people (IDPs) created imbalances in food supply equilibrium and threatened peaceful coexistence with host communities, and the FAO intended to encourage local authorities and populations to grant land plots for farming prior to the influx of new arrivals, it said in an emergency newsletter, received by IRIN on Monday. This project for local community, refugee and IDP integration, which accounted for $5.6 million of the agency’s projected spending in the DRC this year, was essential to protect the environment, where population pressures threatened to degrade land resources through excessive use, it said.

War had destroyed the network of supplies of staple foods from producing areas to urban areas, leading to serious shortfalls in towns and cities, and the FAO would also be distributing quality seeds and essential tools to allow uprooted farmers produce crops in their new communities of residence, the report said. In addition it would help build coping capacities through distributing vegetable gardening kits, seeds and credit in Lumumbashi, Kinshasa and other urban communities, it said. In another project, the FAO intends to help rehabilitate fisheries and aquaculture, assisting 9,000 fishermen on the Atlantic coast and the Congo River estuary, at Pool Malebo and Chenai, Mbandaka and Lake Tumba, and Lake Maindombe in Bandundu Province. Another 9,000 households in Orientale, Maniema, Kivu and Kasai provinces are being encouraged to drag fishing pools and start aquaculture activities. Another FAO priority is to multiply and distribute quality new cassava cuttings to avert the burgeoning threat of cassava disease. The sixth platform for action will see FAO offer technical and logistical support to coordinate emergency assistance, according to its emergency newsletter. [for more detail, see separate IRIN report of 16 March headlined “DRC: Alarming concerns for vital cassava crop”]