Survival strategies not enough

Faced with the food security crisis, Congolese people had adopted various “survival strategies”, including reducing the number of meals they eat per day and increasing their dependency on cassava, the FAO report said. An increasing number of families in Kinshasa were engaged in small-scale food production activities in and around the capital. There had also been some “reorganisation” of internal and regional commercial trade routes. However, these coping strategies “are clearly insufficient to cancel out all the effects of the crisis and there are a number of visible symptoms of the deterioration in peoples’ living conditions,” including increases in child malnutrition, adult mortality and school drop-out rates, the FAO analysis concluded.