Caring about CAR

At least half of the population or 2.5 million people in the Central African Republic are facing a hunger crisis, in a situation that has become dire, the World Food Programme said. 

Bienvenu Djossa, WFP country director in CAR, said on Tuesday that the number of people battling hunger had doubled from 2015 and serious interventions had to be implemented to ensure the crisis did not deteriorate. "It is serious. The situation is worse than last year," Djossa said a statement. "It is crucial that we continue helping the most vulnerable, who need emergency food assistance to survive. This is the time when people need the maximum help possible as it is also the lean season, when people struggle to have enough food to eat before the next harvest." 

Three years of bloodshed and the displacement of nearly one million people from their homes have disrupted harvests and sent food prices soaring. An escalation of violence in September helped exacerbate a massive increase in food prices with the price of beef almost double pre-crisis levels. Families have been forced to sell their possessions, pull their children out of school and even resort to begging. Children receiving school meals under the WFP's emergency programme are putting part of their serving in a plastic bag to take home.

The UN revealed that overall crop production in 2015 remained 54 percent below the pre-crisis average. "Some 75 percent of people in CAR depend on agriculture, and with the planting season starting in less than two months, boosting agriculture now is crucial to revitalising the economy and to stability in the country," FAO Country Representative Jean-Alexandre Scaglia said. Killing and looting had almost halved the number of cattle and reduced the number of sheep and goats by almost 60 percent, the UN said. Damage to infrastructure and insecurity had also hit fishing.

Angola: food is available - people cannot afford it

Millions of Angola's poorest families are facing critical food insecurity as a prolonged dry spell across large parts of the country has destroyed harvests and killed off livestock. Up to 500,000 children are now thought to be suffering from severe malnutrition triggered by the collapse in food production after a lengthy dry season in the first three months of this year. Crop yields are down by as much as 70 percent in some places.

 There are reports of subsistence farmers abandoning their fields altogether in a bid to find other paid work in towns and cities so that they can feed their families, and large commercial farms are laying off workers because there is no harvest to gather.

  Koen Vanormelingen, the United Nations Children's Fund representative in Angola, explained
"This is not a famine, it is an issue of food insecurity. There is food available; the issue is that because people are not producing as much food, they must buy more. And because their production has gone down, their income has also gone down so they cannot afford to buy food, and as supply falls and demand increases, prices are going up - in some cases doubling."

 Despite Angola's enormous oil wealth and the International Monetary Fund's forecast that GDP will swell by 9.7 percent in 2012, nearly two thirds of rural households live on less than 1.75 dollars a day and one of the highest child mortality rates in the world, with 20 percent of youngsters dying before they reach their fifth birthday.

Poor diet is a major factor in the high death rates and according to the latest National Nutrition Survey, carried out in 2007, nearly 30 percent of children under five are stunted, more than eight percent are wasted, and close to 16 percent are underweight.

Vanormelingen explained that this year's weak harvest was already taken its toll on the most vulnerable children, who were showing elevated rates of malnutrition."These people were already living on the border line and were scraping by at the best of times," he said."But where they were once eating a varied diet three times a day, now they are having just one meal a day, maybe two, and they are restricted to a very poor selection of cassava and bananas. It is a very serious situation and we are very concerned because we are seeing a significant increase in malnutrition and malnutrition-related mortality in children," 

Growth goes up - so does hunger

You wouldn't know there's a food crisis in this country, one of Africa's wealthiest and most stable countries, because it's a silent one. This is not the doom and gloom Africa that we often hear sensationalised in the media as a place of coups, famines and corruption. No, Botswana is a model African state which has lived carefully within its means, had democratically elected governments since independence, and is the world's leading exporter of precious diamonds. Africa's resource rich economies continue to grow. In some regards, Botswana is a shining example of successful resource-financed development. It has carefully husbanded a valuable natural resource, diamonds, and invested the proceeds in infrastructure development and education. Botswana's literacy rate of 86 per cent is one of the highest in the world, and its road and hospital infrastructure is admirable. Its government is ranked as one of the least corrupt by Transparency International, it exports high quality, grass-fed beef and its high-end eco-tourism business is booming.

Yet food prices are up here dramatically since 2011, and the rural and urban poor are hurting badly. "Growth with hunger" could be the rest of continent's conundrum in 25 years time. Botswana imports 90 per cent of its food, which has made it particularly vulnerable to rising global food prices. In 2011, global food prices were the highest on average at any time since they began to be systematically recorded in 1990.

Despite consistent growth, the problem is that Botswana also has one of the most inequitable income distributions in the world, second only to Namibia. Resource-based economies are often undiversified and produce deep inequalities. As such, while Botswana is a prosperous middle income country, the median per capita household income in the capital city, Gaborone, is only $2 per day. With two-thirds of the city's population spending nearly half its income on food, rising food prices present a particular problem. Recent surveys suggest that 63 per cent of households in the capital are severely food insecure, and 21 per cent of households in rural areas sometimes go for a day without eating. Botswana does have ample amounts of food, it's just increasingly expensive.

Botswana, while largely rural at independence in 1966, has been urbanising at a phenomenal rate and now has 60 per cent of its population residing in cities and towns. Although Botswana is ahead of its neighbours on this front, the continent as a whole is the most rapidly urbanising region in the world. The poor are disproportionately dependent on agricultural activity. Even the urban poor often depend on food shared with them by relatives in the rural areas. Climate change, the changing macroeconomic structure of the country and liberalised food markets are killing subsistence, dryland agriculture, the long time safety net of the poor. No amount of good governance and welfare payments to the poor can seem to solve the resulting hunger if the price of imported food continues to rise.

The combination of expensive food and deepening inequality means that hunger will persist even if Africa's leaders do everything "right".

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/201254115536921635.html