Helping West Nile's poor to become food secure

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has almost completed a distribution of agricultural aid to about 9,000 families affected by HIV/AIDS in Uganda's West Nile region. All of the families targeted by the donation are headed by women or children. The families are each being given a number of items to increase their self-sufficiency, including 10 kg of high yielding bean seeds, 3 kg of high yielding sorghum seeds and hand hoes. Charles Owach, an official with FAO, told IRIN the plan should be seen as part of a larger initiative to improve the lives of people affected by HIV/AIDS in West Nile. "The issue of livelihood is holistic," he said. "What we can do is provide proper agricultural tools and other aids, which is a very important part of the production of food." The West Nile districts of Arua and Yumbe, close to the borders with Sudan and northern Democratic Republic of the Congo, were chosen because of the widespread incidence of HIV/AIDS there, said the UN agency. Officials from the Ugandan government have commended the initiative. "The only thing now is to ensure it doesn’t overlap with other projects. If we can work together and integrate these various plans for developing agriculture in West Nile, this could work very well," said Carol Kego Laker, Social Development Specialist in the government’s Plan for the Modernisation of Agriculture Secretariat. The international organisation ActionAid - a leading charity in the fight against HIV/AIDS - said any effort to improve the livelihood of people with HIV/AIDS was a step in the right direction. But Semi Angeyo, an official with ActionAid, warned that a wide range of initiatives was necessary to reach all of West Nile's poor. "We can’t rely on agriculture mostly because of the weather," she told IRIN. "The reason is we have had poor rains for about a year now. And manual agriculture is hard for children because it is so physically demanding. We would encourage children to be trading in markets."