Famine ‘threatens five million in Malawi’
Like many, Dona Kijani dives into a crocodile-infested river for water lilies, gambling with death to pull up tubers that are barely edible and give her children diarrhoea. She says it is her only source of food.
For Kijani and many of her neighbours in the dirt-poor southern tip of Malawi, water lilies have become a staple part of the diet as drought withers corn crops, worsening a malnutrition problem aggravated by poverty, corruption and AIDS.
"I have nothing else to give to my children," the widowed mother of three young children said, holding out some of the small, bitter-tasting, gnarled roots.
With the food crisis worsening, President Bingu wa Mutharika declared the southern African nation a "disaster area" on Saturday and appealed for international help. He warned that five million people almost half the population are threatened with hunger.
Opposition politicians complained that the declaration should have come much sooner. But the president has been snarled in an impeachment battle with parliament leaders he accuses of hindering his campaign to clamp down corruption.
Mutharika said the government would spend $50 million (€41 million) to import 330,000 tons of corn from South Africa but that Malawi needs an additional 158,000 tons to help feed people until the next harvest in March or April.
The scene at the Mankhokwe distribution centre, with thousands standing in front of a dusty warehouse hoping to receive the 110-pound monthly corn ration, is a microcosm for what is happening across southern Africa where 12 million people will need food aid in the coming months due to drought, mismanagement and disease. Malawi, one of the world's poorest nations, is the worst affected in the region.
Aid groups fear the current food crisis will be the worst in a decade. Drought has been a blow, and with more than 14% of Malawians infected with the AIDS virus, many farmers are too sick to work.
So far, donors have provided only $28m (€23m) for Malawi relief, far below the $88m (€73m) sought by the United Nations. Appeals for seed and fertiliser have gone mostly unheeded. Even when funds are promised, it takes four months on average for the aid to reach the needy.
"Our window of opportunity to help Malawi and the rest of the region is closing fast," said Mike Sackett, southern Africa director for the World Food Program. "It will be too late once emaciated images appear on television screens," he said, alluding to the crisis in the west African state of Niger.
Corn still can be bought at Malawi's street markets, much of it smuggled from neighbouring Mozambique. But prices have soared beyond the reach of the poor.
Most of the worst-hit villages in the south lie in a fertile river valley fed with water from Lake Malawi. But in a country where most peasants cannot afford even spades and wheelbarrows, farmers have no means to transport the water to their fields.
The government sees irrigation as the answer to the vicious cycle of drought and despair, and it has dredged a few canals to link rivers and Lake Malawi with nearby villages.
"We are fed up of rain-fed harvests. They are not predictable. We want to use irrigation to wipe out this hunger problem because it is perennial. We see it every year," Agriculture Minister Uladi B Mussa said.
There is a glimmer of hope. In Chitsukwa village, in the southern province of Nsanje, the European Union has helped finance projects using pumps operated by one or two people to draw water from a nearby canal.
At the start of this year, only one person in the village was irrigating just a half acre, but now 106 farmers 86 of them women are irrigating 44 acres. The hope is to plant three crops a year.
Irish charity GOAL spent $50,000 (€41,000) on seeds, tools and training for two irrigation projects in the area. Green stands of corn now shoot up in fields that stand out starkly in the barren countryside.
"I can finally produce my own food rather than being dependent on someone else," said Meria Gama.
But the overall picture in the former British colony is grim. Even in "normal" years, more than one in ten mothers dies in childbirth.
Nearly one in five children doesn't reach age five.
