Cape Town - As drought and worsening food security hits swathes of East Africa, maize harvests in Southern Africa - previously slashed by El Niño - are forecast to recover this year, with South Africa’s output expected to increase by more than 50 percent from last year.
A new UN report last week said that access to food has been dramatically reduced in areas suffering from civil conflicts.
“This is an unprecedented situation.
“Never before have we been faced with four threats of famine in multiple countries simultaneously,” Kostas Stamoulis, the assistant
director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said.
Stamoulis said that famine had been formally declared in South Sudan, and the food security situation was of grave concern in northern Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen.
The new edition of FAO’s Crop Prospects and Food Situation report released recently said some 37 countries required external assistance for food, 28 of them in Africa, as a result of the lingering effects of last year’s El Niño-triggered droughts on harvests in 2016.
The report said in South Sudan, 100000 people were facing famine in Leer and Mayen-
dit counties, part of Sudan’s former unity state.
Going hungry
It said overall, about 4.9 million people across the country were classified as facing a crisis, emergency or famine.
In Yemen, the report said 17 million people, or two-thirds of the population, were estimated to be food insecure, noting that “the risk of a famine declaration in the country was high”.
In northern Nigeria, 8.1 million people were facing acute food insecurity conditions, said the report, while in Somalia, an estimated 2.9 million people had been severely food insecure from six months ago.
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It said conflicts and civil unrest in Afghanistan, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Myanmar and Syria were also exacerbating food insecurity conditions for millions of people, as well as affecting nearby countries hosting refugees.
The report said, however, that global food-supply conditions were robust, saying cereal production was making strong gains in the world overall in 2016, with a record recovery in Central America, and larger cereal crops in Asia, Europe and North America.
It said prospects remained favourable for the 2017 maize crop in Brazil and Argentina and the outlook was generally positive for coarse grains throughout the southern hemisphere.
“Prospects for rice are mixed, but it is still too early to make firm predictions for many of the world’s major crops,” the report said.
Although FAO’s first global wheat production forecast for 2017 pointed to a 1.8 percent decline from last year’s record level, that was due mostly to a projected 20 percent output drop in the US.