FOOD-TANZANIA: Help Under Way for Drought Victims

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Dec 11 1997 (IPS) - The rains falling in parts of Tanzania have come too late for some 1.4 million people whom the preceding drought condemned to crop failures and food aid, which will be distributed by the World Food Programme (WFP).

“The first deliveries are going to central Tanzania where the situation is most critical,” the U.N. food agency said here on Thursday. It said WFP teams that visited central Tanzania recently found many farmers who had lost their entire crop this year and used up their food reserves.

WFP said it was receiving daily reports of increased stress and sickness due to severe food shortages. “After 12 months of little or no harvest, many people are malnourished and completely impoverished,” said Irene Lacy, WFP’s representative in Tanzania.

Lacy said, in a statement made available to IPS on Thursday, that many schools were closed for two months now and that “reports from the local health authorities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) confirmed a sharp decline in health and nutrition.”

WFP said it was acting at the request of the government of Tanzania, which reported that three million of the country’s 30 million people had been affected by erratic and poorly distributed rainfalls that caused two successive harvests to fail. Of these, 1.4 million are in urgent need of food assistance.

The 33-million-dollar operation is being conducted with funds donated by the European Union (13.1 million dollars), the United States (9.9 million), Canada (1.4 million), Denmark (1 million), Finland (560,000), Germany (554,000) and Ireland (350,000), giving a total cmmitment of just under 27 million.

“This leaves us with a shortfall of 6 million dollars,” Lacy told IPS on Thursday.

The emergency operation began on Nov 30 when WFP trucks fetched 300 tonnes of maize to feed 212,000 people in the district of Dodoma. During the next six months, WFP says, it will deliver 69,000 metric tonnes of maize and 7,000 tonnes of pulses to assist the most seriously affected people in 48 districts.

Despite heavy rains that have hit coastal and northern areas in recent weeks, cutting off many villages from the main roads, WFP says it plans to reach the most seriously affected villages during the month of December.

It is being helped by 11 NGOs, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and local communites, who are identifying the villages and households most in need, and recommending and confirming food distribution. For its part, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is procuring and distributing seeds.

Lacy said WFP was able to act quickly because of the unique teamwork that exists with the government, donors, NGOs and other U.N. agencies. “Donor response to WFPs request for support has been overwhelming,” she said.

Tanzania’s food crisis went public in August when the government of President Benjamin Mkapa urged the country’s business community to step in and import food to alleviate a grain shortage estimated then at over 916,000 tonnes.

Tanzania, with an estimated gross national product (gnp) per capita of 90 dollars, is one of the poorest countries in the world, according to the World Bank. Moreover, the capacity of the East African nation to defray certain expenses, including food imports, is hampered by a foreign debt that eats up much of its earnings.

It spends a staggering 37 percent of its revenue to service the 8.08-billion-dollar external debt, Mkapa disclosed this week as he appealed for debt relief.

“Tanzania’s government is spending 11.5 million dollars per capita per year to service only a part of the external debt, while it can afford only two dollars per capita on both health and education,” Mkapa told representatives of 30 donor countries and institutions meeting in Tanzania.