Chad has more than 400,000 square kilometres of arable land, but poor rainfall and a reliance on basic agricultural techniques have left the country with a grain deficit in the past two years. The government is turning to mechanisation in a bid to improve harvests. Chad became an oil producer in 2003. But despite the financial rewards raked in from this, the northern and eastern parts of this Sahelian country have suffered famine since 2010.

Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno, whose fourth term began in 2011, has put youth and the countryside at the head of his priority list. He wants to put an end to what he has called “the hellish cycle of famine”. But the cereal deficit has stubbornly remained at more than 500,000 tonnes a year since 2010.

A factory to assemble tractors was opened in N’Djamena in 2009.

The government has made tractors available to smallholder farmers to boost production in the 2012-2013 growing season. As part of the National Food Security Programme (PNSA), some 450,000 hectares of land were expected to be ploughed between mid-June and the end of August and a harvest of 900,000 tonnes of grain is expected.

A total of 914 tractors will till the fields at a cost of 19 dollars per hectare, said Yaya Mahamat Outman, responsible for monitoring and evaluation for PNSA, at the launch of the growing season in April 2012. The receipts from the ploughing will raise more than 8.4 million dollars, which will serve to keep the programme running, he added.

The N’Djamena-Fara district, just 40 kilometres northwest of the capital, N’Djamena, is one of the country’s prime agricultural regions. While fishing and livestock have been the principal economic activities of residents of N’Djamena-Fara, that has changed with the arrival of the tractors.

“With a tractor, even the laziest person can have a farm,” joked Othniel Djimadoumngar, one of the tractor operators assigned to work here. In total, five tractors are working in this area. Djimadoumngar ploughs between seven and eight hectares a day, while it would take several days to prepare even one hectare manually or with an ox.

But keeping the machines running has been a problem. “When a tractor breaks down, we have to fix it ourselves. When we call N’Djamena, no one responds. Even getting hold of base dressing, like NPK (fertiliser added to the soil while ploughing), is not easy. Sometimes you have to go to Douguia, a town 30 kilometres away, to buy them,” said Patrice Allarabaye, head of agriculture in the N’Djamena-Fara district.

Gisèle Bénaïdara Djasnebeye, an agriculture advisor, told IPS that her role in the district is to help producers to achieve the best yields.

“What you see here is a demonstration plot. We teach producers how to transplant rice. You always need to transplant in a grid of 25 by 25 centimetres, or 20 by 20, using a measuring tape. With this technique, if the plot is properly weeded and looked after, a farmer can harvest as many as 90 100-kilo sacks of paddy rice per hectare,” Djasnebeye told IPS.

As the ploughing season draws to a close across the country, some 400 hectares of land will have been tilled in N’Djamena-Fara this year thanks to the tractors. The smallholders paid cash for the service. The rainfall has also been good. If the predictions are accurate, farmers in the district will harvest around 36,000 bags of paddy rice this season.

PNSA’s work complements that of the National Office for Rural Development, established in the 1960s and now the largest and oldest government structure to support farmers.

PNSA deploys extension workers and agronomists in the field to support farmers. Each year, it buys up stocks of staple foodstuffs direct from growers and resells them at subsidised prices during famine or the annual lean period, which runs from the end of June until the first of the harvest is reaped in the latter part of August.

This year it built up a reserve of more 20,000 tonnes of grain.

While rice farming, livestock and fishing are key economic activities in N’Djamena-Fara, it is also a major centre for growing fruit and vegetables. Thanks to the Logone river which flows through the district, many vegetables are available throughout the year, such as cabbage, cucumbers, spinach and carrots, as well as different kinds of fruit.

But N’Djamena-Fara, like many parts of Chad, has difficulties getting this bounty to the capital, despite its proximity. Most of the produce is delivered to Cameroonian merchants who cross the Logone which separates N’Djamena-Fara from Goulfé, a border city.

Mahamat Moussa Kach, sub-prefect of N’Djamena-Fara, told IPS: “We are so close to the capital, just 40 kilometres away, but paradoxically we are cut off from the rest of Chad.” He hopes that an 18-kilometre section of unpaved road will be tarred, as promised by the government, to allow them to transport their produce to the capital.

By François Djékombé
N’DJAMENA, Mar 29 2012 (IPS)

“Only God knows what will happen to me and my children – for two months there’s been nothing to eat. We’re living like beggars,” Henriette Sanglar, a mother of four in the Moursal quarter of the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, told IPS.

“The famine is gaining ground, even here in N’Djamena,” said Diane Nelmall Koïdéré, a nurse at a health centre in Ardepdjoumal, another part of the capital. “Of the 14 children that I saw today, very few weigh what they should at their age. You could see that these children haven’t eaten in the past two weeks. The smallest ones are suffering cruelly from malnutrition.”

One sign of the severity of the famine is that it is hitting hard even in the normally productive agricultural regions in the south of the country. Blandine Karébey moved to the capital from the small village of Bépala to stay with her younger brother, Joseph Ngarmadji.

She doesn’t want to go back to the village, with her two children – aged two and five – even when the rains begin again, because the villagers have completely exhausted their stores of food and have been forced to collect wild fruit and dig up roots that are not eaten in better times.

The effects of the famine have been harshly felt in the area around the capital, considered the country’s breadbasket. But the impact is even worse in the Sahel region, which typically receives less than 300 millimetres of rain per year during a brief three-month rainy season.

As in 2011, when the rains also failed, famine has hit the eastern part of the country particularly hard, devastating communities in the semi-desert regions of Kanem, Guéra and Salamat.

Poor rains have led to poor harvests. In many cases, within three months of bringing in their crop, people had eaten it all, in desperation consuming even the seed set aside to plant in the coming season. To survive, they have either turned to humanitarian organisations for assistance or have flocked to towns and cities where they can find piece-work doing laundry, housekeeping or gardening.

During a recent stop in the capital, Stephen Cockburn, Oxfam International West Africa’s regional coordinator for campaigns and policy, described desperate measures he had seen in the countryside. “In Tassino, a village in the Mangalmé district in the central part of Guéra, women are breaking apart anthills, searching for grain stored there by ants,” he said.

“Women and children are the most vulnerable layer of society. A situation like this, where food shortages lead to prices rising between 100 and 200 percent, has devastating effects and a negative impact on the weakest,” said Marcel Ouattara, a representative of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Chad.

“The crisis hits families who have limited access to primary health services and who are faced with chronic malnutrition,” he said.

As far back as the beginning of January, the authorities recognised the impending danger, and announced the availability of grain at subsidised prices while simultaneously launching an appeal for assistance from the international community.

The government built up stocks of 4,000 tonnes of grain at the National Office for Food Security (ONASA), a state structure set up to prevent famine.

When the famine disaster was formally declared earlier this year, the price of a 100-kilo sack of grain (maize, millet, sorghum) was around 80 dollars, but ONASA is selling the same cereal crops at the heavily subsidised price of 20 dollars per bag.

However, the people stricken by famine are seeing only limited benefits from this government assistance for two reasons: many simply don’t have the money to buy food, even at the sharply reduced price, and instead wholesalers are seizing the opportunity to build up large stocks of these staples that they can resell at the market price and triple their profits.

The government has mechanisms in place to control prices, but it has not acted against the traders who are gaming the system, and ministers seem content to make warning statements. Analysts criticise the lack of government action, saying it foments corruption.

On Mar. 19, Adoum Djimet, minister for agriculture and irrigation, tried to reassure the public in the face of what he termed “the very negative image given by the international media of the famine affecting parts of the country.”

“The government,” he insisted, “is taking action to rescue our compatriots who are threatened by the famine.”

But in the continued absence of additional assistance announced by the government – which has neither provided details of what is to be done nor explained the delays in taking action – and with humanitarian agencies slow to act, people are left with little more than despair.

An agent for the U.N. World Food Programme, who requested anonymity, told IPS that food supplies were on their way to N’Djamena but were held up at the port of Douala, in Cameroon, which borders Chad to the south.

Several NGOs have expressed concern at the rapid approach of the start of the rainy season, warning that if aid distribution doesn’t begin soon, the worst-affected zones will be made inaccessible as roads become impassable.

“Malnutrition will continue to be rampant as long as an urgent and energetic response is not forthcoming from the government and humanitarian agencies,” said Codjo Edoux, the head of the Médecins Sans Frontières mission in Chad.

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By François Djékombé
N'DJAMENA, May 6 2010 (IPS)

The polio vaccination campaign under way in Chad has added significance in 2010. The country recorded zero polio cases in 2004, but 66 cases of wild polio were reported in 2009, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

Administering oral polio vaccine: resistance to vaccination in neighbouring Nigeria is suspected to be behind the spike in cases of polio in Chad. Credit: Edward Parsons/IRIN

Chad shares a border with Nigeria to the south, where for several years resistance led by traditional and religious authorities in the north of the country prevented effective polio vaccination campaigns. Chad’s recent increase in polio cases could be due to contact across the frontier.

According to the coordinator of the Extensive Immunisation Programme, Dr Solomon Chang Garba, the Apr. 1 to May 15 immunisation drive targets more than two million children under the age of five (18 percent of the population).

Ardepdjoumal is a cosmopolitan area in central N’Djamena, the Chadian capital, populated mostly with Hausa and Borno communities. Diane Nelmall Koïdéré, a government nurse, has been working in a neighborhood health centre for five years. During each polio immunisation campaign, she leads a team of 5 to 10 vaccinators deployed to administer the vaccine to 5,000 children in the area.

Misconceptions abound. Some parents argue that the vaccine must not really be effective or there would be no need to administer it to the same child with every campaign. Other sceptics say that the vaccine isn’t free, since they have to pay for a pain-killer to treat the headache that’s a common side effect of the vaccine.

Most seriously, Koïdéré says that some parents refuse to vaccinate their children on the grounds that “vaccines make children sterile” or are “funded by sects” and therefore could give their children other diseases. If such prejudices gain currency, they could limit the reach of the polio immunisation campaigns.

This was the situation in Nigeria until recently, especially in the Muslim-dominated northern states. It fostered the proliferation of the polio virus in the country and its neighbors. But the World Health Organisation reports welcome progress made in vaccinating children against polio in Nigeria and in neighboring states in recent years.   When confronted with any of these arguments, the vaccinator calls in a supervisor for help. If they fail to persuade the parents to vaccinate the child, they often call the municipal police, which intervenes, often forcefully, to ”impose” vaccination.

This happened to Harine, an 18-year-old woman from the N’Djamena neighborhood of Moursal who was arrested by the police during the campaign because she refused to vaccinate her daughter. Her daughter was vaccinated by force in the presence of the Chief of Police and she paid a fine of 3,000 CFA francs – about $6.25 US.

Assabé Bimba, in her fifties, is councilwoman in Walia, a residential area of N’Djamena. ”Vaccinate your children, sisters; if I had played with my children’s health, of the nine that God gave me, maybe two or three would have been crippled…” she pleaded with the women who are reluctant to vaccinate their children.

It is Cherubin Ndiglengar’s third year as a vaccinator in the anti-polio campaign. He regrets that the campaign doesn’t run year-round. Thanks to the 5,000 CFA (about $10.40) earned for each day of immunisation, he’s able to pay his rent and part of his tuition. In the past he peddled fake medicine, but stopped after he learned what a health hazard they were for the community.

The new vaccination strategy is operated in the same way in both rural and urban areas. According to the vaccinators, in rural areas the village leaders contribute greatly to the success of the operation.

The United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF) and World Health Organisation are the Chadian government’s steady partners in the fight against polio.

The campaign is highly visible: giant posters are displayed everywhere; public service announcements on radio and television show the extent of the mobilisation. After the setbacks in recent years, the main question remains: when will polio be eradicated in Chad?

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