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FROM THE FIELD

Red Cross assessment highlights post-flood food insecurity in Zambezi valley
24 Jan 2008 17:22:00 GMT
 Source: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) - Switzerland
By Alex Wynter in Sena, Mozambique

Website: Website: http://www.ifrc.org

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Young boys were catching capenta fish along the flooded and impassable stretch of the 213 highway, which, after Caia, exactly follows the course of the south bank of the Zambezi.
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Young boys were catching capenta fish along the flooded and impassable stretch of the 213 highway, which, after Caia, exactly follows the course of the south bank of the Zambezi.

Background

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An extensive Mozambique Red Cross (MRC) field assessment over the weekend has highlighted growing concerns over food security in the flooded Zambezi valley.

A team of MRC volunteers led by the Sofala provincial secretary, Giro Jose Custodio, who is now based in Caia - the government flood-relief coordination centre, toured villages along the southern bank of the Zambezi to get a first-hand account of needs.

Food quickly emerged as a major issue.

The team also distributed paracetamol rations in two of the villages: Magagade and Tchecha.

In Sena, 60 kilometres to the north-west of Caia, local officials said agricultural losses in this year's rainy-season floods are already estimated to be much worse there than a year ago.

"In the 2007 floods just over 11,000 hectares of maize were lost in this district," Alfredo Osorio Sozinho, the town administrator, told MRC volunteers.

"We estimate the losses this year are already running at about 14,000 hectares."

First flight

The population of many villages up and down the Zambezi valley ballooned almost overnight when scores - in some cases hundreds - of people moved into them from vulnerable low-lying areas.

The MRC has been deploying volunteers to help them resettle and providing basic medical and first-aid facilities.

"Our core work is health and water and sanitation, not food," said Custodio, "but we have plenty of volunteers and if WFP puts food in a centre where the CVM [the National Society's Portuguese acronym] is active, we will distribute it."

In practice, that means virtually every population centre in this part of Mozambique -certainly including Mutarara, destination for Monday's first operational flight from Caia by the World Food Programme.

A chartered Ukrainian MI8 flew a consignment of mosquito nets, plastic sheets and a tent for a field medical centre to Mutarara, all provided by UNICEF. Food will follow shortly.

Mutarara, on the opposite bank of the Zambezi from Sena, is the capital of the worst-affected region of Mozambique, and the focus of much government, Red Cross, UN and NGO relief activity. Several agencies have now set up bases there.

"During our field assessments we've met people who relocated from their flooded villages and have been living off bananas and the few vegetables they brought with them," said Hugh Cole, a team leader for Oxfam International's Mozambique flood response.

"The adults have been giving what's left of their maize stock to children.

"Every few days people have been going out by canoe to flooded villages to collect bananas from above the water line, and this is clearly not a sustainable situation."

Evacuated villagers have also been going back to dig up the sweet-potato crop from under the flood water, where it can survive for at least two weeks, or turning to ganho ganho, as local people call agricultural day-labour.

On the road from Caia to Sena the Red Cross team met Loenita Vega, 37, standing beside her maize plot, looking after a neighbour's children. The crop is complete write-off, but she did not appear entirely downcast: "I'll just have to look for work," she told the volunteers.

Further up the road there were more signs of the perennial optimism and adaptability of rural Africans.

Young boys were catching capenta fish along the flooded and impassable stretch of the 213 highway, which, after Caia, exactly follows the course of the south bank of the Zambezi.

Across Africa, after the continent's year of rain and flood, a proportion, at least, of some affected populations have been able to quickly turn from subsistence agriculture to fishing in order to survive.

Crocodile attack

However, in Mozambique it's widely recognized that some riverside and low-lying areas are simply no longer tenable, and a great deal is riding on the government's ability to make the areas where people have been resettled truly viable.

The MRC emphasizes the importance of providing proper health facilities, for example.

"We've met people who've been flooded out two years in a row and now say they've had enough and want to give the resettlement areas a chance," adds Cole.

"What people need in the immediate future is something to get by. Then we have to turn our attention to longer-term income generation and livelihood support."

Meanwhile, the senior Mozambique government official in charge of the Caia operations centre confirmed to the International Federation that only seven deaths have been associated with the floods.

Joao Ribeiro, deputy director of the Instituto Nacional de Gestao de Calamidades (INGC), said these included three crocodile attacks and another three were accidents; only one is being regarded as truly flood-related.

Given that the latest official total of people who have been safely evacuated by boat from low-lying areas nationwide, including by Red Cross aquatic rescue teams in four provinces, is 71,000, this has to be seen as a triumph for disaster preparedness.

All eyes in Mozambique are now on the weather forecasts for February, which are not good. If the rains come again in strength, the chances are any floods will start from a much higher base.


[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]

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[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]

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