As food runs low, govt calls for US $2 mln

The government of tiny Guinea-Bissau this week appealed for US $2 million to stop tens of thousands of people from going hungry in its southern rice-bowl region, where both food and cash are running low. The West African nation needed funds to buy seed vital for the next harvest as well as rice and cooking oil and sugar, Agriculture Minister Sola Inquilin na Bitchita told reporters. But the aid would also be used to rebuild protective barriers around the region’s rice-fields, washed away by unusually heavy rains last year. The flooding allowed saltwater to leak into irrigation channels, meaning that rice crops failed for a second year running. A team of experts from the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) are currently in the area to assess the situation, officials said. The food shortage due to last year’s poor rice harvest is being compounded by problems on the cashew nut market. Cashews are Guinea-Bissau’s top export, with four out of five farmers producing more than 80,000 tons a year, making it the world’s fifth top producer. But as cashew farmers sweat to complete the annual April-June harvest, traders are refusing to buy the nut on the grounds that the price set by the government - 350 CFA francs (US $0.70) a kilo - is too high. This year’s price was raised by the government in line with promises made at elections last year aimed at giving farmers a better deal. Halfway into the harvest, only 1,500 tons of this year’s estimated harvest of 100,000 tons - or less than one percent - have been bought, said a trade ministry source. This means that farmers are severely short of cash to buy food and other staples and that some are selling at rock-bottom prices, such as US $0.30 and even US$ 0.20 a kilo (150 and 100 CFA francs). “This is pure theft on the part of traders,” said the president of the national farmers’ association Mama Samba Embalo. A local said last week that starving peasants in the Quinara and Tombali regions and the Bijagos Islands of the former Portuguese colony are chewing on unripe mangos for sustenance as food stocks run dry. In average years the verdant southern region of Guinea Bissau grows more than 70 percent of the country’s 100,000-ton rice crop, according to the FAO. Meanwhile in the north of the country near the border with Senegal, fighting between Bissau troops and Senegalese separatists has displaced around 10,000 people and disrupted harvesting. Agriculture remains the most common way of life for Bissauans, who are the fifth poorest people in the world, according to the 2005 UN Human Development Index.