UN says food insecurity in the north likely to worsen

Persistent insecurity and funding shortfalls are hampering humanitarian operations in northern Uganda, placing the already vulnerable displaced populations there at great risk, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has warned. OCHA said this week that the insecurity caused by fighting between the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and government forces in the area had resulted in a "bleak" food and sanitation situation, under which internally displaced persons (IDPs) were suffering from severe malnutrition and had become vulnerable to a host of communicable diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea. "The civilian population of northern Uganda remains almost totally isolated from the rest of the country. Due to persistent insecurity, IDPs have almost totally lost access to their fields, hence, the dismal August/September 2002 harvest," OCHA aid in a statement. Although the next planting season is in March, for an August harvest, the prevailing dangerous security situation is likely to persist and obstruct the IDPs from working their fields, according to the statement. This has meant that the population will continue to rely heavily on assistance from the World Food Programme (WFP), which has been supplying food to the IDPs and refugees in northern Uganda. "There have been lower than normal harvests that have resulted in precariously low household food stocks. Continuing insecurity is raising concerns that IDPs will not be able to gain adequate access to their homes and fields to cultivate food in the coming major season, which starts around March 2003," OCHA said in a statement. Last month, however, WFP said it had been forced to suspend distributions of cereals to the IDPs in the north and to reduce all cereal rations to refugees by 50 percent due to a shortfall affecting its food pipeline. "It should be noted that unless security greatly improves, the IDPs will not utilise the coming planting season usefully, and might remain food insecure and, therefore, reliant on food aid," OCHA said. The UN has launched a Consolidated Inter-Agency Appeal for US $89 million to meet the humanitarian needs of Uganda's vulnerable populations in 2003.