Peter APPs
4 June 2005
Port Louis — 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 Machinga 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 per cent of the adult population is infected by HIV and 60 per cent live on less than $1 a day - there are some signs people are being won over.
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