AFRICA-FOOD: Famine Belt Stretches From Sudan to Rwanda

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Oct 4 1997 (IPS) - Famine has hit a swathe of land stretching from the Sudan to Rwanda, forcing millions to depend on food handouts from donors.

The latest country affected is Rwanda, five of whose 11 provinces are reported to be facing acute food shortages. “The situation is serious in the Gikongoro region (in the south) where rains have failed,” Rwandan Minister of the Interior and Social Reintegration, Hararimana Abdel Karim, told journalists this week in Kigali.

A similar alarm was raised on Sep 25 by Sudanese rebel leader Col John Garang, who appealed for international food aid for an estimated 2.6 million people in the south of his country. Garang, an agro-economist, told journalists here that an “acute food shortage” had been caused in southern Sudan by the “El Nino effect”.

El Nino is a warming of the Pacific ocean that occurs every few years, disrupting weather patterns in various parts of the world, Africa included.

Garang, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), urged the international community to rush in food, medicine and blankets to alleviate the situation. “There has been no rain in Sudan this year. The situation is very bad indeed,” he told a press conference here.

Failed rains also forced Tanzania’s President Benjamin Mkapa to appeal for food aid in mid-September. His country faces a food deficit of 900,000 metric tonnes and, to fill the gap, Mkapa has urged business people to help the government import food, offering them tax relief.

Most countries in the region require food relief as a result of the scant rainfall: Ethiopia needs about 219,000 metric tonnes, Eritrea 169,000 tonnes, Somalia 86,000 tonnes, Kenya 268,000 tonnes, Uganda 30,000 tonnes, Burundi 17,000 tonnes and the Democratic Republic of Congo 65,000 tonnes, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

In Rwanda, state-run radio said this week that the price of food in Gikongoro region had skyrocketed and children had been abandoned by families that could not afford to feed them. Radio Rwanda quoted its correspondent in the area as saying that beggars in the market outnumbered buyers.

Humanitarian agencies have blamed the crisis in Rwanda on a lack of agricultural inputs and/or a lack of manpower and water management, which led to a low level of cultivation during the July to August season. They say only 60 percent of land usually in production was planted.

A recent report by the FAO estimates that 1.6 million people in Rwanda will need to be fed in the second half of 1997, an increase of 25 percent over the corresponding period of last year. The report entitled ‘Food Supply Situation and Crop Prospects in Sub- Saharan Africa’, estimates Rwanda’s overall food production in 1997 at 18 percent below the 1990 level.

Reacting to the Radio Rwanda report, Seth Sendashonga of the exiled Resistance Forces for Democracy in Rwanda (RFD) told IPS here on Wednesday that Gikongoro had always been prone to drought and famine.

“Ruhengeri and Gisenyi are the main foodbasket of the nation. They are also where a lot of military activities is taking place at the moment. And because of those activities, people there have not been able to work their fields,” he said. “The result is a decline in food production in Rwanda.”

Sendashonga said the production of coffee, Rwanda’s major foreign currency earner, has also been affected. “Rwanda used to produce 30,000 metric tonnes of coffee per annum. Now it produces only 7,000 tonnes,” he said.

The food situation in Rwanda began deteriorating when, in November 1996, more than one million refugees started returning home from camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania.

They had left their country in 1994 when the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), then a rebel group, overthrew a three-month interim regime, thus ending massacres in which at least half a million people reportedly died.

Clashes between the military and some of the returnees have been reported over the past months. So have attacks by the former refugees against survivors of the 1994 killings.

All this has increased the insecurity in parts of the country and its need for assistance from agencies such as the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) which announced in August that it would provide six months’ food resettlement rations to 1.2 million ex- refugees in 153 communes.

Like Rwanda, the rest of the sub-region will need food aid for some time to come. The amount required in 1996/1997 by sub-Saharan Africa as a whole is expected to decline by some 15 percent from last year, but it remains high at two million tonnes, according to the FAO.