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| National |
| No plans for relief food yet |
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by
Bright Sonani, 10 May 2005
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14:22:54
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Government has not yet come up with plans to start distributing relief food following a delay in the vulnerability assessment report which is supposed to give direction on the areas severely hit by food shortage and need urgent assistance.
The report was supposed to come out last Friday but Commissioner for Disaster Preparedness Randson Mwadiwa said on Monday the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC) was still working on the food situation report.
“The report is supposed to be ready today. When it is out we are supposed to discuss it and see the areas which need food urgently,” he said.
Mwadiwa explained that the report did not come out as expected because some field workers were still collecting data.
According to Mwadiwa in an earlier interview, the MVAC report comes after the second crop estimates which show areas critically affected by food shortage and how people would cope up with the situation.
“The second estimates show coping mechanism in the affected areas while the MVAC report identifies the areas and number of people to be affected,” he added.
He, however, said government carried a quick vulnerability assessment which showed Phalombe, Balaka, Machinga and some parts of Zomba as the districts already in need of urgent assistance.
Mwadiwa said rough estimates indicate that the country needed between 150,000 and 200,000 metric tonnes of relief maize.
Currently the strategic grain reserves have 60,000 metric tonnes of maize which is for both relief and sale.
Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture Andrew Daudi said earlier that if government is to distribute relief maize it would be in a form of food for work rather than free handouts.
Reports indicate that most parts of the country are already feeling the effects of the food shortage after some families failed to harvest anything following a prolonged dry spell that hit most areas early this year.
Some six family members in Mangochi last week were reported dead after eating wild yams, a situation which a member of Parliament from the area attributed to food shortage in most households in his constituency.
But government has defied calls to declare a state of disaster arguing that it is not yet time to panic.
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