By Servaas van den Bosch
WINDHOEK, Mar 24 2009 (IPS)

Don't talk about food prices in Namibia. Wedged between costly imports from South Africa and failing projects to achieve food security, Namibians are upset, and hungry.

A student at Mashare Irrigation Training Centre in Namibia tends to his crops. Many graduates are still waiting for farmland that was promised to them by the government. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

Hour after hour they lift heavy sticks to pound mahangu, Namibia's staple food, in the baking sun. When one grows tired, a neighbour takes over but the work never stops. A small amount for dinner takes forever to grind. Let alone churning out large quantities for one of the many open markets in the capital, as these women do for a living.

Johanna Kunalimwe sits in one of these markets in Okuruyangava. Baskets with different grades of mahangu surround her. Those that are used as ingredient for oshikundu, the traditional beer, look particularly empty.

"People are complaining," she sighs, brandishing a cloth that is alternately used to wipe beer containers and to fan herself. "The food in the shops is too expensive, even basics like mealie meal. A bag is easily $50 or $60 [Namibian] dollars."

Fifty Namibian dollars – five U.S. dollars – for a 10 kg sack of mealie meal… in a country where the UNDP's latest survey found 60 percent live on less than two U.S. dollars a day, and the inhabitants of Havana squatter camp are more likely to be in the 35 percent that survive on less than a dollar.

The rest of the staple foods come from the north of the arid country. Many families collectively work their mahangu fields and sell the surplus to pay for clothes and school fees. Others will send it south to their families in the squatter camps.

Although there are no official figures these transfers are an important lifeline for the urban poor. Even after the government slashed the Value Added Tax (VAT) on millet in 2003/2004 and last year again on beans, cooking oil, fat, bread and cake flour.

But it is not enough. The temporary relief is overshadowed by food prices that, according to the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU), have risen 17 percent year-on-year.

In the rural areas, continuous cycles of floods and droughts have created a severe hunger gap towards the end of the dry season. Figures from the World Food Programme (WFP) show that the malnutrition rate for children under five is 29 percent.

The dissatisfaction with the food situation is widespread, but not organised. "There are some soup kitchens, but that's about it," says Baton Osmani, country representative for WFP. "There is chronic food insecurity in some areas that is compounded by shocks, such as floods."

Admir Bay, head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation mission in the country, concurs. "There are pockets of poverty, but I wouldn't call it a serious situation. Every country wants to produce its own food, but this is not always realistic. Namibia, as a middle income country is in the fortunate position that it can import food."

And so it does. Two-thirds of Namibia's food comes from neighbouring South Africa. The high prices that come with imports are a hidden humanitarian tragedy for the 30 percent that is classified as poor, or severely poor.

"South Africa has its own problems," a commercial farmer on the Angolan border told IPS. "If their exports are halted, we will literally starve."

The government has responded with subsidies for dry land cropping and irrigation schemes along the country's few perennial rivers.

"There are many problems surrounding the green schemes," explains Siegfried Engels, head of Mashare Irrigation Training Centre. "Some seem to have completely failed, while others are still being built."

While he drives through the hectares of maize along the Okavango river, around him hostels are constructed for the army of jobless and landless. "Inputs have to come from government and often come too late."

Basilia Shipepe is in charge of short courses for communal farmers at Mashare. "This once was a thriving livestock breeding centre and a research station for crops", she says. "Now there is nothing going on."

Disillusioned, she put in an application at the Ministry of Gender in Windhoek. "After nine years I will finally be out of here."

The schemes work on a profit-sharing basis, with the government putting in the infrastructure and commercial farmers getting a tender to farm the project and incorporate emerging farmers. But rising input costs have affected the schemes and when government altered the terms of the agreement, some commercial farmers left for Botswana in disgust.

"This is a big problem," says Charity Mwiya of the Namibian Chamber of Commerce. "We are working hard with the Ministry of Agriculture to clear the air. There is no question that the country needs the private sector to impart the knowledge and skills that are needed to beef up the food production."

In 2005, the US Agency for International Development concluded that the Kavango region, the hotspot for these initiatives, was littered with failed development projects.

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