Poor harvest for hungry Basotho

The tiny mountain kingdom of Lesotho is experiencing a food emergency this year as a result of two successive poor harvests and rising local prices for staple cereals. Last week Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili declared a state of famine and called for urgent assistance. He said preliminary indications were there would be a very low harvest of cereal crops in 2002/03, resulting in a deficit of about 220,000 mt. This week a UN Food and Agricultural Organisation and World Food Programme (WFP) team will tour the country to make their own assessment of what the projected shortfall will be. Their report is likely to be old news to Ntsane Moshoeshoe, who has been farming in Thabo Bosiu for 27 years. While most Basotho are exceptionally proud of their heritage, Ndade Moshoeshoe is even more so as he is a descendent of Lesotho's founding monarch, King Moshoeshoe 1. Moshoeshoe 1 used the mountain top of Thabo Bosiu, in northwest Lesotho, as a place of refuge during all too frequent times of strife in the 1800's. For his foes, rival tribes and colonisers alike, it was an uphill battle. Moshoeshoe 1's mountain keep was unassailable. His descendent now farms in the shadow of the mountain and faces foes who are just as deadly, but harder to beat. Moshoeshoe told IRIN that frost, extreme cold and hard rains had severely affected his maize and wheat crops. Said Moshoeshoe: "We tried by all means to plough and plant the crops for a successful harvest this year. But, unfortunately, the frost and the extreme cold have dried the crops before they are ripe. "That's the problem this year in the whole of Lesotho. The need for food will be very high, there's not enough crops at all." Heavy rains late last year also delayed the planting of crops for this years' harvest. Said Moshoeshoe: "In 2001 we did not have enough food because we had a drought. And now we have had a lot of rain." "We started ploughing late in November 2001 for this year's crops. We should have started by October last year and then sow the seeds in November. We started sowing at the end of November and early December. That is too late." Modern day Lesotho, now a constitutional monarchy headed by Moshoeshoe 1's great grandson, King Letsie 111, is hungry. Only nine percent of the country is arable land, the rest is mountain. The WFP's acting officer in charge in Maseru, Viney Jain, told IRIN: "Lesotho has always been a food importer, local production accounts for less than 50 percent of requirements in a good year. But with [recent] drought and natural disasters people now have no coping mechanism [no means of obtaining food]." Prices of basic commodities in the capital, Maseru, have doubled in a year, according to a recent WFP study. Moshoeshoe said: "We estimate we'll have a failed crop that is beyond the normal percentage. We estimate about 40 percent of the crops have failed. This means an extreme lack of food. People will be forced to eat these crops that are not ripened, we call it motamo [green maize]." Although used to the hard life of a farmer, he knows the coming months will be harder for those who have exhausted coping mechanisms. These include vulnerable groups such as the unemployed and people living with HIV/AIDS. "The food [security] situation in the country this year will be extremely bad. Despite the fact that last year government helped us by subsidising the ploughing of the land and the seed and fertiliser," Moshoeshoe said. His wheat field alone is 13.5 hectares and his maize field is much larger. Yet he still has not had a successful harvest in two seasons. Moshoeshoe's entire wheat crop has been wasted. "That machine of the government, the combine harvester, did not come at the right time. The machine should come by January to harvest the wheat, or at least by February. It came in March and it failed to harvest the wheat because the weeds had grown over the wheat," he said. He had expected to get a minimum of 100 bags of wheat, each bag weighing in at 80 kg, and a maximum of between 200 to 250 bags of wheat out of the crop. "I don't even have one bag. There was a lot of rain and the weeds grew ... now all that wheat is wasted, 13.5 hectares of crop that was ploughed and planted, all the money spent on fertiliser and seeds is wasted," lamented Moshoeshoe. He had paid the equivalent of about US $180 for use of the combine harvester. Moshoeshoe will continue farming despite the setbacks. With the percentage of arable land dropping from 13 percent a few years ago to nine percent today - in part due to rapid urbanisation and creation of settlements on arable land - Lesotho needs its farmers.