Inter Press Service - May 6, 2003
Chisa Mutaka

The grant will be channelled through the U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID) to Catholic Relief Services (CRS), CARE and World Vision to provide emergency and supplementary food distributions, agricultural support and development training in the three countries.

The three-year grant will provide 160,000 metric tonnes of food in the first year. Once the programme is fully operational, it is expected to assist nearly two million people, primarily women and children, with sorghum, wheat, maize, maize flour, beans and vegetable oil, each month.

"Our immediate goal is to save lives by getting food to people as quickly as possible, especially those communities decimated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic," Steve Goudswaard, spokesperson for the group, said this week.

Poor rainfall, political instability and the HIV/AIDS pandemic have combined to create the most severe food shortage in Southern Africa.

More than 15 million people in Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe need food aid until September, according to aid agencies.

Malawi will get 4,683 metric tonnes of food worth 3.4 million U.S. dollars between March and September this year, according to a memorandum of understanding between the three organisations and the government of Malawi.

Malawi experienced a drought and later floods which destroyed hectares of crops leading to the food shortage.

From October 2002 to September this year, Zambia will receive 16,257 metric tonnes worth 11,786,325 million U.S. dollars.

Zimbabwe has the biggest food aid package with 33,750 metric tonnes worth around 25 million U.S. dollars between 2002 and Sep 2003.

The programme will involve a combination of free food distributions, food-for-work projects and supplementary feeding.

The programme, which will include an HIV/AIDS component, will be managed by the three organisations from a base in Johannesburg, South Africa, with each agency taking the lead in specific countries.

The CRS is managing the component in Zambia, CARE in Malawi and World Vision in Zimbabwe.

All three organisations are signatories of the Baltimore Declaration, a unified pledge of NGOs and the World Food Programme (WFP) to act in an effort to prevent famine from taking hold in parts of southern, eastern and western Africa.

The programme in Zimbabwe was launched in January. It will benefit about 664,700 Zimbabweans from Beitbridge, Bulilimamangwe, Chegutu, Kadoma, Gweru, Chirumanzu, and Gutu districts.

Zambia's hunger situation is expected to improve with the expected harvest of close to one million metric tonnes of maize. The country's annual consumption stands at 1.2 metric tonnes but was only able to produce 600,000 metric tonnes last season mainly due to drought.

CARE's Miles Murry says his organisation was planning to move into southern Zambia where more people have become vulnerable to hunger due to drought. CARE has been working in central Zambia.

According to statistics from the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service on the southern Africa's grain production in the 2001/2002 season, Zimbabwe's maize crop was estimated at just 500,000 metric tonnes, down 66 percent from the other year's poor crop and the lowest output since 1991/92.

Many factors contributed to Zimbabwe's catastrophic harvest: seasonal rainfall was down by 75 percent in many crop areas, agricultural inputs (fertilizer, fuel, irrigation water) were very costly or unavailable, high yielding commercial farmland was taken out of production, and serious economic and political problems disrupted the agricultural sector.

In Zambia, maize production was estimated at 600,000 metric tonnes in 2001/2002, down 23 percent from the previous year and the smallest crop since 1997/98 season.

Zambia has suffered from severe drought for three consecutive years.

In Malawi, maize production was estimated at 1.54 million tonnes in 2001/02, down 10 percent from the previous year.
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