DRC ‘nearing famine’ in wake of ongoing crises

HUNGER in the Democratic Republic of Congo has soared in the past year, leaving 7.7 million people in urgent need of food aid and pushing the country closer to famine than it has been in a decade, food security experts said yesterday.

Much of the rise in hunger – 1.8 million new people were added to the list – stems from escalating violence in the Kasai and Tanganyika regions, which in Kasai alone has forced 1.4 million people to flee their homes in the past year.

More than 1.5 million people are now facing “emergency” hunger levels, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), whose members include the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme, said.

“Emergency” means people are forced to sell possessions and skip or reduce their meals. It is one level below a classification of famine in the IPC’s internationally-recognised five stages of hunger.

“This is the first time in 10 years that we’re so close to level five (famine),” said Alexis Bonte, FAO’s interim representative in Congo. “It’s a humanitarian tsunami, but it’s a silent tsunami, that’s the problem.”

Congo now has 3.8 million people displaced within the country, in addition to a steady flow of refugees from neighbouring Burundi, Central African Republic and South Sudan.

“It has been hidden by other crises,” Bonte said, referring to South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen.

The crisis has worsened with the advance of the fall army worm, a crop-eating caterpillar, that has spread to many parts of the country, as well as by outbreaks of cholera and measles.

“I think the donors are really tired of funding the crisis in Congo,” Bonte said, in reference to conflicts that began in the 1990s and have affected millions of people every year since. The UN has received only a quarter of the $812.6 million sought in the humanitarian appeal for Congo this year.

While the government needs to stabilise and reduce the conflicts, humanitarian agencies need to be able to give aid, otherwise people are more likely to resume fighting, he said. “We cannot hope to make change if we abandon the people.”

Violence has escalated in Congo since President Joseph Kabila refused to step down after his mandate ended in December.

Bonte said the displaced – many of them women – need seeds and farming tools to become self-sufficient, ease pressure on the communities hosting them and reduce tensions. When local NGOs in Chikapa provided farmland for some 2 000 families who had fled their homes earlier this year and FAO gave farming equipment, they were able to harvest vegetables to eat and sell within weeks.

“Normally in a development project, it would take a year to do this. This was just a few weeks, because the ladies were desperate to do something to escape the trauma they had suffered and reclaim their dignity,” Bonte said. – Thomson Reuters Foundation.