TWO MILLION people in Chad will go hungry by June, the head of Oxfam GB’s mission in the country said yesterday, unless there is an immediate intervention by the international community.
Speaking in the capital N’djamena, Paulina Balaman said the failure of the rains for a second successive year meant pastoralist herders from the north could start moving to refugee camps in the south and east of the country, putting pressure on humanitarian hubs already straining to deal with Chad’s internally displaced people and refugees from Darfur.
“That will mean that they won’t return to the fields to till the soil. So instead of just conflict IDPs , we’ll have food security ones too,” she said.
In Goz Belde in the east, she said, there were already 55,000 IDPs, but it was possible that another 50-70,000 will arrive and become dependent on the assistance of NGOs and the UN. “That has already happened with the IDPs we have,” she said. “There are regular food distributions” in the camps, which meant “there is no incentive to go back” home. If farmers stop making money they cannot buy seeds to restart the agricultural cycle, she added.
“We did an assessment of 130,000 people in just one area, and found that 103,000 were at risk of hunger,” said Ms Balaman. “Of those, 70,000 are at risk of dying of hunger.”
She added that the situation was critical, as malnutrition levels were skyrocketing among children. “People are already dying.”
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said the malnutrition rate stands at 27 per cent in some areas.
The benchmark for a crisis is 15 per cent, said Jean Luc Siblat, country director for the WFP in Chad. Severe malnutrition stands at 4.5 per cent, when the threshold is 1.5 per cent. “So we are at three times the rate, which is already alarming.”
The situation has been exacerbated by a drying up of funds from the international community. Irish Aid gave $1.6 million (€1.3 million) last year to UNHAS, the UN’s specialist air service. This year, they have given just $400,000.
Meanwhile, Oxfam said it needed £16 million (€18.4 million) to deal with the crisis, but has “received nowhere near that amount” so far. It said it has had to take £3 million from its reserves, “an unprecedented” situation, according to Sharon Prendiville, an Irish employee with the agency in the region.
“It is very hard to get funding for Sahel, even though it is the poorest region in the world. The last time there was a crisis here we were criticised for intervening too late. But governments don’t fund us until they see people dying in the streets. We were saying that we needed money in April and may need to stop people going hungry in June and July.”
Chad is just one part of a food crisis that stretches from Mauritania in the west of Africa to Chad in the centre, across what is known as the Sahel belt. Nearly 10 million people in the area are facing a serious food crisis after erratic rainfall in 2008 and 2009 caused poor agricultural and pastoral production.
Cereal production is down 9 per cent from last year, but in Chad the situation is far worse.
In November 2009, when the UN World Food Programme first warned of a food crisis in the country, it produced a study which revealed there had been a 34 per cent reduction in food production from the previous year.
This is one of the effects of the Sahara desert’s movement south, which has forced herders to move from their traditional areas in search of land, bringing them into conflict with farmers who use the land for tillage.
Despite these problems, the country is finding it difficult to attract global attention.
“Chad is a landlocked country that only came to the world’s attention because of Darfuri refugees. But even then it was not known as a country of its own” said Ms Balaman. She said that when she previously gave a tour to journalists in the east of the country in 2007, they reported that the Chadian IDPs were in fact Darfuris. “There was no mention of Chad. But then Sudan and Darfur was in the news. Despite the IDPs and the food crisis, people don’t really hear about the country.”