Maputo — The Mozambican government's Disaster Management Coordinating Council on Friday presented its contingency plan for the 2002/03 agricultural year, which envisages expenditure of up to 46 million US dollars for activities intended to minimise the effects of natural disasters.
Addressing representatives of the donor community and of civil society, the director of the country's relief agency, the National Disasters Management Institute (INGC), Silvano Langa, stressed that the main problem facing the country remains drought over much of central and southern Mozambique.
Currently an estimated 587,000 people are in need of food aid because of the failure of last year's rains. Continuing drought is liable to increase the number of people at risk to 1.4 million.
"Drought is the main concern for this contingency plan", said Langa. "We must act in an organised, systematic and speedy manner".
The southern provinces of Inhambane, Gaza and Maputo, and the western province of Tete are the areas most vulnerable to drought. But there are also pockets of droughts in parts of the northern provinces of Nampula and Cabo Delgado, made worse by the brown streak disease that has hit the cassava crop, the main staple food in this part of Mozambique.
Coping with drought will absorb most of the resources envisaged under the contingency plan. Drought mitigation measures are budgeted at more than 32 million dollars. Measures to deal with possible cyclones are costed at nine million dollars, and flood mitigation efforts at 4.8 million.
The current drama in Nampula, and the neighbouring province of Zambezia, where thousands of people have lost their homes, was caused by the torrential rains brought by tropical depression "Delfina" a week ago.
Langa said that efforts are under way to provide tents, blankets, food and medicine for the victims.
The government has now made a further billion meticais (42,000 dollars) available for health requirements in Zambezia and Nampula, in the wake of "Delfina".
The greater part of this money is allocated to Nampula.
According to deputy national health director, Avertino Barreto, this is the province most at risk of epidemics of diseases such as cholera, particular because rains and mudslides have destroyed much of the drinking water systems in the main urban centres in Nampula.
Barreto said that health brigades have been instructed to chlorinate water supplies in the province, to set up reserves of drinking water where possible, and to mobilise the public to treat water properly before drinking it.
