Maputo — The Mozambican Ministry of Agriculture has announced that it has 500 tonnes of maize seed available to support peasant farmers who have lost their crops, in whole or in part, because of poor rainfall in the south and centre of the country.

The seed can be used in the second sowings that start in April, and will allow some farmers to recover from the failure of their first sowings. The seed available is sufficient to plant 20,000 hectares of maize.

The harvest outlook was discussed in Maputo on Thursday at a meeting to analyse rainfall in the first half of the rainy season (October to December), and its impact on agriculture, and to update forecasts for the second half of the rainy season (January to March).

Hiten Jantilal, of the Crops and Early Warning Department in the National Directorate of Agricultural Services, said that granting seeds to peasants is an attempt to alleviate the impact of the dry conditions that affected central and southern Mozambique during the first sowing period. The northern provinces did not suffer from the same problem.

Jantilal added that the Ministry is banking on replanting short-cycle maize, rice, sorghum and beans to compensate for losses in the first sowings. The Ministry will also push for intensive use of irrigation to produce vegetables all year round as well as root crops.

According to a document presented at the meeting, 61 districts in the central and southern provinces have been affected by irregular rainfall, putting a million hectares of farmland and 785,000 households at risk of drought.

As for the forecast until March, the National Meteorology Institute (INAM) is predicting normal rainfall in the far north (Cabo Delgado and part of Nampula provinces), but "with a trend to below normal".

For the rest of the country, the INAM forecast is for below normal rains, but "with a trend towards normal".

INAM blames the dry conditions on the El Nino phenomenon. This is a warming of the surface waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean, which is strongly correlated with dry conditions in southern Africa.