MAPUTO, April 2 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Hundreds of rural communities were plunged into food crisis after Cyclone Idai tore through central Mozambique on March 14 with the government estimates that more than 700,000 hectares of agricultural land was flooded, leaving many farmers with nothing to harvest.
More than 750 people died in the storm and heavy rains before it hit Mozambique and two other southern African countries, Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Two weeks later, as search and rescue operations wind down, the focus is shifting to feeding the survivors.
“Food-security-wise, it’s been devastating,” the World Food Programme’s director for Southern Africa, Lola Castro, said in the cyclone-hit port city of Beira.
“We have to scale up fast.”
WFP has delivered food aid to some 200,000 Mozambicans and aims to reach a million in the next two weeks, Castro said.
But that is not enough. Farmers also need seeds to re-plant as quickly as possible.
“It needs to be done yesterday,” Castro said.
The storm could not have come at a worse time, barely a month before the main maize harvest, the region’s principal crop.
In countless villages, households desperately trying to dry green, unripe cobs salvaged from the flood waters. But villagers said eating the cobs was making them ill.
In Bebedo, 100 kilometers northwest of Beira, dozens of families came out to see a Russian-made helicopter land in a cloud of dust, carrying a WFP delivery of fortified food.
Within 20 minutes, they had carried more than a hundred brown boxes of Plumpy’sup, a fortified peanut paste used to treat malnutrition in young children, as well as white sacks containing a soy and corn flour blend.
It was the second delivery that day. The village is being used as a distribution center to feed neighboring communities — 17,000 mouths in all.
But residents said Nhampuepua, an hour and a half’s drive from Beira, was falling through the cracks. The only aid that had reached there by Saturday was donated by a local petrol company.
Nhampuepua’s suffering highlights the scale of the task confronting humanitarian agencies and the government.
The United Nations humanitarian coordination agency, which is overseeing the disaster response, estimates that 1.85 million people scattered across an area of 3,000 square kilometers were affected by the storm in Mozambique alone. — NNN-AGENCIES
