Millions face food shortages before end of May

An estimated 3.5 million Tanzanians will need food aid before the end of May but improving rains and the impending harvest mean that in some parts of the country the food situation was improving, humanitarian workers said on Thursday. The latest figures, made available to IRIN by humanitarian sources, are from a survey the government carried out in February. The figures have not been publicly released yet. Until the latest assessment, the government and humanitarian partners had been quoting the figure of 1.9 million people in need of aid due to drought in parts of the country. Government officials were unavailable for comment, but the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) Network in Dar es Salaam, confirmed the latest figure. However, a WFP programme officer in charge of food security, Juvenal Kisanga, said that the rains had come in some parts of the country and "in a month or so" some people would harvest their food crops. Moreover, Kisanga said that WFP still had 9,000 mt of food to distribute while the government would be releasing a further 14,000 mt from its reserves and another 10,000 mt would be arriving in the country from Kenya. While the rains would eventually ease the burden, for the moment, the wet conditions were making the logistics of delivering food aid more complicated and the government still faced "lots of challenges", he added. A FEWS Net analyst in Tanzania, Gerald Runyoro, said that while people's coping mechanisms were being stretched and further assessments would need to be done, "the situation will not be too bad". "This is not the best time to be conducting an assessment," he said. "It will be better in July once the food has been harvested and we will have a better idea of what is available." He added: "We don't have any founded information of people starving or dying, but people are just coping with difficulty."