Malawians battle with hunger, babies fail to grow as drought hits

Three months after reaping his harvest,which in a year without drought allows him to feed his family for 12 months, Malawian farmer Adamson Tegede, 65, ran out of food.

“From August onwards, we survived on food given to us by others and on some vegetables we managed to cultivate,” says the father of seven, who lives near Ngwangwa trading centre, 20 kilometres north-west of the capital Lilongwe.

“We ate once a day — and some days we hardly ate at all. We often felt weak because of hunger.”
In a normal year, Tegede’s two-acre farm yields five ox carts of maize for his family’s consumption and 600 kilogrammes of tobacco for sale, the friendly farmer explains.

But after the southern African country was hit last year by drought,which experts have linked with climate change, Tegede only harvested one ox cart of maize and 30 kilogrammes of tobacco.
The farmer now feeds his family with a 50-kilogramme sack of maize as well as beans, pigeon peas and cooking oil, which he fetches at a distribution point of the UN World Food Programme in Ngwangwa once a month.

As a new drought caused by the climatic phenomenon El Nino is now ravaging Malawi, the next harvest is at risk of being equally lean,UN officials warned as about 350 people queued for food supplies in a school yard.

Women, men and youths stood patiently under a canopy protecting them from the sweltering sun, pressing their fingerprints into an identity register before proceeding to receive sacks of maize, which they carried on bicycles, ox carts or just on their heads. In southern Malawi, the situation is even worse after floods — also linked to climate change — swept through crops and killed about 100 people in early 2015.

About 2.8 million Malawians — nearly 20 per cent of the population — face food insecurity, making the country one of the worst hit in southern and eastern Africa, where drought affects 50 million people, according to UN figures.

“It is only in a few months that we will feel the full impact of the drought,” said Ricardo Pires from the UN children’s fund UnICEF.

In the lush Lilongwe area, the presence of the drought is only revealed by occasional drooping maize stalks and patches of dry grass.

But the impact is obvious at a health centre in Mitundu, 30 kilometres south-east of the capital, where Margaret Filimoni is sitting on a mattress on the floor, feeding her son from her withered breast.

Tamandani is seven months old, but looks half his age. “I was eating very little,” the 49-year-old subsistence farmer and mother explains.”My milk dried out and my baby started getting smaller and smaller.” The health centre is now giving Filimoni nutritious food to help her breast-feed again, but Tamandani may never grow up to the man he could have been.

An insufficient diet in infancy retards physical and intellectual development, Margaret Mkandawire from UNICEF said.

The phenomenon known as stunting, which the UN says affects more than 40 per cent of Malawian children under 18, does not only exist in times of drought. Experts link it with poverty, which limits people to an one-sidedly maize-based diet, unclean water and poor hygiene standards, which cause diarrhoea.

The World Bank classifies more than half of the population as poor in Malawi, where over 80 per cent depend on subsistence farming.

The ongoing drought prompted the government to seek 146 million dollars in food aid, Agriculture Minister Allan Chiyembekeza said. UN sources said about 24 million dollars of that amount still remain to be pledged. The food crisis caused by the drought is exacerbated by financial problems linked to corruption.

The government says it has imported 30,000 tons of maize from Zambia and acquired 25,000 tons locally to sell at subsidised prices.

But it lacks the funds to acquire sufficient amounts, after it lost donor support making up 40 per cent of its budget over a corruption scandal that broke in 2013. 

The government’s maize sales are meanwhile undermined by smaller-scale corruption, with officials selling maize to private vendors who resell it at exorbitant prices, said John Kapito from the Consumers’ Association of Malawi.

 “We can no longer bury our heads in the sand. Climate change [is] affecting national food security,” Chiyembekeza said. — dpa

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