Africa, Development & Aid, Headlines

DEVELOPMENT: Lesotho Bears Brunt of Difficult Harvest in Southern Africa

Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Jun 30 2004 (IPS) - The camera zooms in on a woman who is complaining of weakness and a skin rash. “The doctor says I’m not eating enough,” she told a South African television station this week, in a news clip shot in the tiny kingdom of Lesotho.

This country, surrounded by its giant neighbour, South Africa, is facing a third successive year of food shortages. According to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), a poor maize harvest earlier this year has meant that the Basotho are in for another hard winter.

“The winter crop did not do well. We hope we shall have good harvest in June/July next year – if we have good rain,” Techeste Zergaber, WFP Country Director for Lesotho, told IPS from the capital – Maseru – on Tuesday, Jun. 29.

For its part, Lesotho’s government estimates that between 600,000 and 700,000 people will need food aid until the next maize harvest in 2005. According to Zergaber, the country will require about 1,500 tonnes of emergency food every week.

Officials in Maseru appealed for aid early this year. “But the response has been relatively slow, although some food is trickling in now,” a source at the Ministry of Agriculture, Co-operatives and Land Reclamation said in a telephone interview with IPS Tuesday.

While the lack of rain has clearly been an important factor in this crisis, Lesotho’s poor harvests are also the result of lack of access to agricultural necessities such as fertilizers, worsening soil erosion and degradation – and the devastating impact of AIDS.

According to the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), about 30 percent of the adult population in Lesotho is infected living with HIV. AIDS campaigners say farmers who are falling victim to AIDS-related diseases cannot cope with the challenge of producing crops in difficult conditions. As a result, both the short- and long-term food security of their families is jeopardized.

“We are now in the middle of the winter. One cannot suppress the cold with an empty stomach,” Zergaber notes. And, this is occurring in a country where living conditions for many are already precarious. According to the World Bank, about two-thirds of Lesotho’s population lives below the poverty level of a dollar a day.

The Food Security Early Warning System Monthly Update for May 2004, compiled by the 14-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC), also paints a grim picture of the food situation in Lesotho. It says that the country, with a population of 1.8 million, may experience a 46 percent drop in cereal harvests following poor rains and reduced crop plantings in recent months.

Preliminary crop production assessments suggest a total cereal output for the 2003/04 crop season of 51,000 tonnes, 46 percent below the 2002/03 output of 94,000 tonnes – and 63 percent below Lesotho’s five-year average, says SADC.

The regional grouping also ascribes this poor production to late and erratic rains and a lack of access to quality seed and fertilizers – saying these factors have led to a reduced area being planted for crops. Production failures are likely in the Leribe, Berea and Mafeteng districts, it adds.

To make matters worse, crops also suffered from frost in December – while hailstorms have caused severe crop damage in certain areas.

SADC warns that the food security situation in Lesotho will continue to be troubling during the 2004/05 season, with an anticipated cereal deficit of 303,000 tonnes.

Forecasts of reduced cereal production due to drought or excessive rains have also emerged from other countries in the region according to SADC, notably Angola, Malawi and South Africa.

These findings have been echoed by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), a group of researchers in Africa and the United States that tracks food security in various African countries.

Official projections in Zimbabwe for the latest maize harvest have come in at 2.43 million tones, a 157 percent increase over last year’s poor harvest of 946,000 tones. This is despite the fact that the country has experienced late and erratic rains, shortages of seed and fertilizers – and insufficient tractor and animal power to till fields, (although SADC notes that improved rainfall between January and March this year favoured late planting).

However, a number of analysts have cast doubt on the projections of the Harare government, which has refused to allow the UN to conduct its own crop assessment. Since 2000, Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector has been thrown into disarray by farm seizures conducted under the auspices of a land redistribution programme.

A survey carried out by the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee (ZimVAC) has also contradicted the government’s claim that Zimbabwe will be able to feed itself this year. ZimVAC says the April survey indicated that 2.3 million people in rural Zimbabwe will need food aid in the coming months.

Despite the difficult conditions in certain SADC countries, official crop production forecasts for the 2003/04 season indicate a regional all-cereals harvest of 22.87 million tonnes.

This marks a slight increase of one percent over the 2002/03 output of 22.75 million tones, according to SADC.