International donors offer aid amid drought, famine

The drought in Zambia has led to co-operating partners and other countries offering humanitarian assistance to the Southern African country where over six million people are in dire need of food after a failed harvesting season.

Vice president Mutale Nalumango said a total of 2,4 million people had been supported with relief food through the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit since October last year.

Over a million hectares of the more than 2,2 million hectares of land where maize was planted had been destroyed.

She said the UN had initiated a US$30 million (R560 million) disaster management plan to help Zambia overcome El Niño conditions and climate change.

She said Zambia would launch a humanitarian appeal to the UN to mobilise money for humanitarian support, livelihood recovery and resilience building for more than one million households.

The US government said in a statement it pledged its continued support to Zambia’s response to the effects of climate change and the impending threat of food insecurity. It recognised that El Niño weather conditions and associated reduced rainfall in major agricultural production areas of Zambia had led to devastating consequences that risk food security.

The US government said it supported ongoing agriculture-related programmes in Zambia with initiatives such as capacity-building for smallholder farmers, enhancing agricultural productivity, and promoting sustainable land management to help empower Zambians to combat food insecurity.

Additionally, the US government is attracting private investment in the agriculture sector and offering targeted trade facilitation support to small and medium-sized businesses engaged in climate-smart production.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation is working with the Zambian government to develop a compact programme that will help realise a shared vision whereby both commercial and smallholder farmers will join hands to produce a variety of crops and create jobs in Zambia through growth in agro-processing.

The compact will also help to build roads that link farms to markets, leverage private capital to expand agricultural production and agroprocessing value chains, and support critical agricultural policy reforms.

Senior officials from the US Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security were expected to visit Zambia in March to meet government and civil society partners to discuss the ways in which the US can continue to support Zambia during this time of crisis.

The International Monetary Fund has heeded a plea from Zambia and will return to the country in mid-April to do an economic impact assessment of the devastation caused by the drought in various sectors.