Drought after drought in Mozambique

Another new IRIN feature...

Suazina Antonio and her neighbours scrape sand from the bottom of a shallow well in central Mozambique until enough water seeps out to fill two buckets. The water is salty, but after four years of failed rains, it is precious.

The landscape in the drought-affected southern half of Mozambique is pocked with water holes; when one hole dries up, the villagers move on to another.

"People are malnourished - they already do not have food, but when you have no water it becomes very difficult. The people in our district have been living on wild berries and fruit, but in some places we do not even have enough of that," said a gaunt Fernando Muchanga, a local government official in the Buzi area of Sofala province in central Mozambique.

People throughout Mozambique's drought-hit provinces tell similar stories of no water and little food.

Four years ago, residents of the Moamba district in Maputo province were subsistence farmers living on the fertile belt between the Incomati and Sabie rivers. The green trunks of fever trees, which grow in marshy areas and along riverbanks, seem out of place in the surrounding scorched vegetation and dry Incomati riverbed.

In 2000 the same region was flooded - a disaster which affected almost 300,000 people. "Faced with such calamities, the people in the region have become more resilient," an aid worker commented.

Some subsistence farmers have turned to informal trade, selling charcoal or firewood to earn a living, but those who were ranchers, like Melody Pelembe, are struggling. "We have already sold all our cattle and goats. We have nothing now."

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is currently underfunded by $8.5 million and reaching only around one-third of the more than 500,000 people in need of assistance in the provinces of Maputo, Gaza, Inhambane, Manica, Sofala and Tete.

Around 28,000 people depend on WFP's food-for-work programmes.

"We could have supported a lot more if we had more funds," said WFP spokeswoman Kerstin Reisdorf.

The agency can only support 50 households in the Moamba district, who are building water holes lined with rocks to save rainwater. The work earns them just over 60 kg of cereal, about 6 kg of beans or lentils and some vegetable oil every month.

When available in rural markets, the staple maize-meal sells at almost US $5 per kg - twice the price this time last year. Those villagers that cannot afford to buy depend on wild fruits, leaves and roots for food.

Growing numbers of people are being treated for diarrhoea because they are eating food not meant for human consumption, said Sonia dos Anglos Faustino, a coordinator with the Mozambique Red Cross.

"Many people are also suffering from cholera because they do not have access to clean drinking water," she added. Water holes are often shared with livestock, increasing the chances of contracting water-borne diseases.

Piped water and even functioning water pumps are rare in the countryside, which is still recovering from the impact of 16 years of brutal civil war that ended in 1992.

"We do not have enough resources to cover the demand - we are yet to reach the remote areas which have been the hardest hit by the drought," said Francisca Cabral of Mozambique's Technical Secretariat for Food Security and Nutrition (SETSAN).

In Maputo province people allege that neighbouring South Africa is reluctant to share the water of the Incomati. "The river has a lot of water on the South African side - there is nothing here," said a local government official.

The Komati river, as it is known in South Africa, rises in the Drakensberg mountains, flows through Swaziland and then re-enters South Africa just before it joins the Crocodile river and flows into Mozambique as the Incomati. The two countries have an agreement to maintain a certain level of water in the river.

A South African government official acknowledged the impact of irrigation schemes run by farmers on its side of the border, and drought, "over which we have no control".

Recurring natural disasters - droughts and floods - have taken their toll on Mozambique's development record.

A steady economic growth rate of 8 percent helped reduce poverty from 69 percent in 1997 to 54.5 percent in 2003, but the country still has one of the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) rankings in the world - 169 out of 177. The HDI, compiled by the UN Development Programme, takes into account income, education and life expectancy.

The government has drawn up a strategy with a "bottom-up" approach to tackling recurring droughts, which is currently being examined by donors, said Cabral.

The strategy advocates changes in the farming system, urging farmers to grow drought-resistant cereals like sorghum and millet, once traditionally grown in Mozambique, and also tackles issues related to inputs, livestock and training.