/REPEAT/DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO: WFP Airlifts Seeds To Help Farmers

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Aug 27 1997 (IPS) - Thousands of families in the southern Kivu area of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will benefit from urgently-needed bags of seed from the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), giving the farmers a chance to plant before the rains end in a few week’s time.

Kivu is the region where the rebellion in the former Zaire — now re-named the Democratic Republic of Congo — kicked off, resulting in the May toppling of President Mobutu Sese Seko, who had ruled for 32 years.

WFP, in a statement made available to IPS this week, said it began airlifting the seeds Tuesday from Lubumbashi to Bukavu, the main town in Kivu, to give some 15,000 families, mostly returnees, a chance to plant. Lubumbasi is Congo’s second largest city, on the border with Zambia.

Many people have returned to their home areas following the seven-months conflict.

A WFP chartered C-130 aircraft landed Tuesday in Bukavu with 18 tonnes of seed, the first tranche of 280 metric tonnes of maize seed, bean seed and soya seed. The seeds will be delivered in 16 flights over the next two weeks.

The seeds were locally purchased from a seed farm some 200 kilometres outside of Lubumbashi, by a consortium of non- governmental organisations.

To discourage hungry families from eating their seeds, WFP says they are providing a one-month food package to families receiving the seeds as part of a “seed protection” programme.

“Tens of thousands of families have recently returned to their homes around Bukavu having been displaced for months as a result of the war. Many have not been able to cultivate over the past year and have not had a harvest for the two agricultural seasons,” said a spokesperson at the WFP office here.

She said that by providing free seed, aid agencies are trying to ensure that these families, most of whom are already struggling to cope with having little food to feed their families and are too impoverished to buy food in the markets, are able to sow crops for the next harvest in January 1998.

WFP has provided airlift support to the Great Lakes region — made up of Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, Tanzania and Uganda — since October 1996, when the first WFP planes began arriving in Kisangani, the third largest city in the DRC, with emergency food supplies for hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees.

“With the majority of the funding coming from the European Union, along with support from the governments of the Netherlands and Japan, WFP aircraft were able to ferry a total of 8,346 metric tonnes of food into the former Zaire,” according to the WFP statement.

It said WFP also participated in a massive U.N. airlift repatriation operation which began at the end of April 1997 and which to-date, has flown some 50,000 refugees back to Rwanda. More than 50 percent of these people were flown on WFP aircraft.

Aid agencies operating in the region say the food supply situation is still critical in the east of the DRC — of which Kivu region is a part. They say severe malnutrition is rampant among remaining refugees and that the security situation there is also still tense.

They estimate the number of remaining refugees to be more than 20,000, in addition to about 190,000 internally displaced persons. Nearly 95,000 of them are in Masisi, and the majority of them are from the Hunde ethnic group which has been prevented from going home by continuing insecurity.

Mwita Rukandema of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) headquarters in Rome, Italy, told journalists here(Nairobi) in early August that only millet and sorghum were growing satisfactorily in the east.

“In Rotshuru, near Goma, the current sorghum, maize and coffee crops are reported to be poor, due to intermittent rains, lack of basic inputs, as well as delayed plantings due to civil disturbances and population displacement,” he said.

Despite the small deficits in parts of the country, the Democratic Republic of Congo has always been self-reliant in food compared to other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa like the Sudan, Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Most of the U.N. emergency food supply to the DRC has been directed to refugees. The country has been the scene of one of the largest and the most dramatic refugee movements in Africa’s history, according to the latest FAO publication, ‘Food Supply Situation And Crop Prospects In Sub-Saharan Africa’.

In 1994, well over one million Rwandan refugees fled their country to seek refuge in the Congo after a rebel group toppled the regime in Kigali. Most of them have now returned to Rwanda.

The Congo is also home to refugees from the Sudan and Uganda. Around 92,000 Sudanese and over 37,000 Ugandan refugees remain in the country, of which more than 20,000 arrived since mid-June, fleeing fighting in the Kasese district in Uganda.

And, within the Congo, in the Kasai region, approximately 600,000 displaced people, who arrived in 1992, fleeing ethnic violence in the Shaba region are present. “Many of them are self- sufficient, except in Mwene-Ditu, where their nutritional situation is reported to be critical,” according to the FAO publication.

It estimates the 1997 cereal import requirement (January/December) for the Democratic Republic of Congo at 180,000 tonnes of wheat and rice, and 60,000 tonnes of coarse grains.