More IDPs cultivating their own fields

Improving security in parts of northern Uganda is encouraging an increasing number of people displaced by conflict to move from camps to villages closer to their original homes where they now cultivate their own fields, a famine early warning agency reported. However, the majority of the nearly two million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the region, mainly children, the elderly and women, remained in camps, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) said in its May update on the situation in northern Uganda. An estimated 100,000 people in the districts of Gulu, Kitgum and Pader had moved to 18 smaller camps, closer to their original homes, Chris Magezi, a spokesman for the Ugandan army in northern Uganda, said on Friday. In Lira district an estimated 50,000 people had moved nearer to their villages, said Matthew McIvenna, emergency coordinator, United Nations World Food Programme. The IDPs fled their homes because of conflict between the Ugandan government and the Lords Resistance Movement (LRA), a brutal rebel group that has mainly targeted civilians for attack and abduction during the past two decades. "The movement out of the camps has increased IDPs' access to land to cultivate crops this season. Anecdotal information and a recent UN FAO [UN Food and Agriculture Organization] sampling exercise, limited to only about two camps in Gulu District, indicate that some IDPs in select camps can now access double the cultivable land compared to previous seasons," FEWS Net said. In Lira District, where few LRA incidents have been reported in the recent past, improved civil security has enabled some IDPs to move out of camps to go back to their homes. Humanitarian conditions, however, remained poor, and many IDPs still depended on humanitarian organisations for the bulk of their needs, FEWS Net said. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in an update in May, said the security situation in the Acholi and Teso regions had stabilised with no major LRA-related incidents involving civilians reported. Access to land, it noted, had increased principally along side main roads patrolled by the Ugandan army.