Many farmers hit by last year's drought have lost their crops again - and some villagers are so hungry they're raiding ant hills for food.
MONGO, Chad (AlertNet) - Many Chadian farmers hit by last year’s devastating drought have lost their crops again - and some villagers are so hungry they have resorted to raiding ant hills for tiny grains and seeds.
The country appeared to be on the road to recovery this year with rains producing good harvests in many areas. But aid agencies are warning the food crisis in central and western Chad is not over.
In the remote village of Anzarafa the fields are dry and filled with failed crops. Villagers say they have received no support from the government or international aid groups.
“Nobody came to help us, we haven’t seen a gramme of food aid and now our crops have been attacked by grain eating birds and locusts,” Djibril Krouma, the 56-year-old village chief, told AlertNet.
He said the situation is so severe that young men are migrating west to the capital N’Djamena, about 500 km (300 miles) away, to look for work, and women are leaving the village to dig ant hills for wild grains and seeds - survival patterns usually only seen at the height of the annual lean season in particularly bad years.
“We will dig these ant hills around the village, when there are no more we shall go further away and harvest wild fruits to feed the children,” said Ashta Idriss, a mother of three whose two elder sons have left to look for work in the capital.
A drought last year slashed cereal production across West Africa’s Sahel region, which runs south of the Sahara desert, leaving an estimated 10 million people short of food, including 2 million Chadians.
Although abundant rainfall has boosted harvests and international aid agencies are still in the region, the Spanish charity Oxfam-Intermon warned that the overall response to the food crisis may be undermined by the failure to reach a good proportion of vulnerable people.
“We have to be careful not to shout victory as if the crisis is completely over,” said Celestin Faya Milimouno, Oxfam-Intermon’s food security officer in the central town of Mongo.
ROADS CUT OFF
Authorities say attacks on crops by birds and insects are a recurrent problem in the area but they hope the villagers will get help as more international aid agencies arrive in the region.
Most aid agencies in Chad are focused on the east of the country where they are helping around 500,000 refugees from Sudan and Central African Republic and internally displaced Chadians. This has made it difficult for them to deploy to other parts of the country hit by hunger.
In addition, some roads across Chad are cut off during the long rainy season. Aid workers say they can get stuck in rivers and take days to reach some places.
Experts say the response to the hunger crisis in Chad should include medium and long-term measures to strengthen food security in an area prone to drought.
They say governments in West Africa’s Sahel region must invest more in agriculture and pastoral livelihoods. Chad should also promote the cultivation of nutritious crops like groundnuts and cowpeas (black eyed peas) which are drought resistant and less vulnerable to attack by birds and insects than the traditional millet and sorghum.
In the village of Roumou, about 40km from Mongo, farmers expect a good harvest this year, but they want irrigation projects and food reserve granaries to protect them from recurrent drought.
“Food aid is good, but our salvation will come only when we are able to properly manage water so that even in a season with erratic rainfall we can still farm,” said Weldi Abashen, a smallholder in Roumou.
The food shortages have exacerbated a chronic malnutrition problem in Chad’s Sahel belt. The U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF) said its nutrition teams had saved the lives of 5,000 children but feared many more may have died.
“There are still many communities that have not been reached,” Marzio Babille UNICEF’s representative told AlertNet.
He said the agency had set up 12 mobile units with doctors and nutritionists who travel to remote villages to look for children with severe malnutrition for referral to hospitals and nutrition centres run by aid groups.
“The most important thing for us is that we can save as many lives as possible,” he added.
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