Free food to stop, but emergency not over

Free food distribution in Malawi will finish at the end of May following an overall improvement in the country's food security. However, the emergency is not yet over. In February 2002 food shortages led President Bakili Muluzi to declare a national disaster and make an urgent appeal for food aid. Seventy percent of the country's 10 million people were at risk of starvation in the worst food shortage in 50 years. The shortages were brought on by climate conditions, poverty, HIV/AIDS and the government's controversial sale of its strategic grain reserves. Crop failures and food shortages increased child malnutrition and school dropout rates, families were split up as partners migrated to find work to buy food at inflated prices, and over 800 people in the poorest communities died of cholera because their immune systems were too weak to fight the illness. Over a year later, national food reserves have improved due to grain imports by the government, NGOs and private imports, and a free seed and inputs campaign. The latest Famine Early Warning Systems (FEWS NET) report said maize sales to the public are 35 percent lower than last year as farmers are now harvesting their own crops and becoming increasingly dependent on their own food production. There is also more maize on the market. Weather patterns, which lurched from extremely dry patches to storms during the crucial planting and early growing season, appear to have settled and most of the country received adequate rains. Early indications are that at a national level, the country may not experience the same level of production-related food security problems as it had in the past two years. "But the danger is not over in some areas," World Food Programme reports officer Antonella Daprila told IRIN on Thursday. "Just because food availability is higher than last year, doesn't mean everybody has access, and purchasing power is still very low." Daprila said beneficiaries knew their free food would stop at the end of May and the government and NGOs were now trying to target their operations to those still in need. Plans were still being finalised, but they hoped to increase school feeding programmes, expand its HIV/AIDS support, start up food-for-work and food-for-assets programmes, and look at ways of alleviating problems in the health sector. "Poverty will be a recurrent emergency and we want to try to reverse that trend. Between 60 to 65 percent of the people in Malawi live in poverty now," she commented. FEWS NET said food shortages still existed in parts of Nsanje, Chikwawa, Mwanza and Mangochi districts in the southern region, and parts of Mzimba, Rumphi and Karonga districts in the northern region, where there have been prolonged dry spells. In addition, a ban on the movement of livestock in the lower Shire valley in the south, due to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, is expected to have an impact on the supply of meat in the region, especially in the city of Blantyre.