Southern African farmers must diversify away from their staple maize crop to more nutritious and drought resistant plants if they are to avoid further food shortages and malnutrition crises, aid workers say. Maize has been the mainstay of the southern African diet for generations, but a series of crop failures has left millions across the region facing shortages in the last decade as farmers battle drought and the death of workers from the HIV pandemic.
"Southern Africa needs to diversify," James Morris, head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), told Reuters at a food aid distribution point in southern Malawi.
"But it's not easy. People have been eating maize a long time." With regional producer South Africa expecting its largest maize harvest in over a decade after good weather, the World Food Programme is unlikely to have much difficulty finding maize to buy for the seven million in the region it says will likely need aid but says it wants to buy other crops as well.
Rains failed in February and March across a belt stretching from Botswana through Zimbabwe to Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia just as the maize crop was ripening.
In Malawi, harvested corn was stunted and a third of normal size. But in Zambia, widespread failure of the maize crop has been partly alleviated by a good cassava crop, officials say.
In the highest mountains of Lesotho and Swaziland, aid workers say maize is unlikely ever to succeed. In Matching in Malawi, WFP officials are distributing sorghum a more drought resistant crop they hope they will be able to persuade the local population to accept.
With sorghum and cassava already being given to orphans and the sick in Malawi where 14 percent of the adult population is infected by HIV and 60 percent live on less than $1 a day there are some signs people are being won over.
"I prefer the sorghum," says 38-year-old Kamangira Beckon, a skeletal figure lying in the shadow of his hut in a village near the Mozambique border.
Without food aid from WFP and money earned by his wife, he says he could not survive. But when they are given a choice, most Malawi's would still rather stick with their maize porridge than try anything new.
"You can't give out maize and sorghum or anything else at the same distribution point," said Penelope Howarth, who runs WFP operations in southern Malawi.
"People always want the maize and they fight over it." When enough maize is available, health workers say it is a struggle to persuade locals to also eat nuts and vegetables to boost their intake of essential nutrients.
Some mothers feed their young babies nothing but maize, leaving them malnourished. In a hospital in Malawi's southern city of Blunter, skeletal children lie listlessly in bed or in their carers' arms, some coughing with tuberculosis or other AIDS related diseases.
Fifteen percent will die in the unit. "People need to be taught that just maize isn't enough," paediatrician Jane Ellis said. Lack of food and nutrients hastens the development of HIV, killing patient's faster and depriving communities of key workers like farmers and teachers.
But for many Malawi's, vegetables are seen as more of a cash crop than source of nutrients. "They grow tomatoes and sell them at the side of the road, but most don't actually eat them," said WFP reports Officer Antenna D'Aprile.
Comments
Comments are closed.