The impoverished mountain kingdom of Lesotho has experienced three consecutive years of drought-induced food shortages. Irin spoke to three people about how their lives have been affected by the crisis.
Ishmael Nthlomo, 53, is part of a World Food Programme (WFP) food-for-work project in Tsoeneng, southwest of the capital, Maseru. Along with 244 other able-bodied members of his community, Nthlomo has been involved in constructing a large dam, from which they hope to benefit for years to come.
”We’re [heading into] the fourth year of drought and we have not been able to plant any crops,” he said. ”We depend on agriculture because we don’t have jobs, so our main source of food should come from crop production. But with the drought … it has really affected the availability of food in our homes.”
With eight people in the Nthlomo household, the family has had to rely on dwindling piecework and targeted food aid for the past three years.
”While some people managed to plant crops, these are the better-off households — the poorer ones would seek piece-jobs at these households. There were a few households with someone working in the mines [in South Africa], and they gave people piece-jobs,” Nthlomo said.
With the widescale retrenchment of migrant Basotho mineworkers, this source of income has dried up. As a result, many households who depended on labouring in the fields of better-off families have found themselves without work.
Migrating to cities
”Most of the young people have gone to the city to look for jobs — a few have gone to South Africa to look for jobs. Most of them are doing domestic work over there [in South Africa],” Nthlomo added.
As part of a WFP food-for-work project, Nthlomo is now able to take home to his family a 50kg bag of maize meal, two litres of cooking oil and five kilograms of pulses. The ration is highly valued, ”even though sometimes we don’t get all the [commodities],” he said.
In the Makhoathi community, a rural area on the outskirts of the capital, Maseru, 350 people are receiving targeted food assistance under WFP’s vulnerable group feeding (VGF) programme for the first time since the food crisis began. It is further evidence that, as the food crisis deepens, more communities are becoming vulnerable.
The residents of Makhoathi had previously been able to produce enough food and held enough assets to weather two years of drought. But following a third year of no rains, they have exhausted their ability to cope.
The 2003/04 crop and food supply assessment mission found that the Maseru district had been affected by the cumulative impact of years of drought, the retrenchment of mineworkers and HIV/Aids.
Many people living on the outskirts of the capital do not have access to land to cultivate crops and have depended on remittances from mineworkers or casual work in the fields of others to get by.
However, the drought has brought a sharp drop in agricultural employment and many households no longer have breadwinners working in the mines.
The impact of HIV/Aids on these communities has been severe, said one humanitarian worker. ”Now, every third house you go to has someone living with HIV,” the aid official noted.
The growing unemployment rate has meant that people ”no longer have money to purchase inputs … and when the government did promise to provide inputs in 2002/03, they came late,” the aid worker added.
In the small fields around Maseru, which would normally be the scene of intense smallholder farming activity around late August/early October, no sign of activity could be found.
Agnes Mojakisane, 48, a resident of Makhoathi, lives with her 24-year-old daughter and her two young children. She had just been added to WFP’s VGF programme. She said she hoped the days of going to bed with an empty stomach would soon be over for her family.
”There’s nobody who is employed in the household. My daughter used to sometimes get piece-jobs in the [textile] factory, but the last time [she was employed] was in April this year. Most times there’s no work,” Mojakisane said.
She used to do domestic chores for those who were better off in her community, but she has been unable to do so recently due to illness.
When Mojakisane was able to work and buy food, she complained that she had ”earned too little to buy seeds and fertiliser to plant in my field. I wanted to do share-cropping, but the drought meant I could not find anyone to share-crop with,” she said.
”I have one field but it’s not planted and is located in a swampy area. Also, the seeds and fertiliser the government distributed in 2002/03 came too late in the season [to be used effectively], so I’ve had no crops for the last year. My daughter’s piece-jobs had been the only source of income,” she added.
As a result, the family no longer eats three meals a day. They have reduced meals to one a day sometimes, their diet consisting mainly of pap, a maize-meal porridge. ”During the course of this week there was no food at all in my home. We usually get some food from neighbours, although some nights we go to bed without having eaten anything that day,” Mojakisane said.
She hopes to be included in the programme once the PRRO begins. ”We would be more than happy to get into an income-generating project — chicken and pig farming would be fine,” she added.
Mary Pelea, in her early 50s, has lived alone since her daughter got married and moved away with her new husband and their one-year-old child.
Her daughter was the sole breadwinner in the home, working in Lesotho’s export-driven textile factories during the food crisis. Now that she is married with a child and an unemployed husband, she is unable to provide assistance to her mother.
”For the past three years my daughter has been able to support me, but she moved away in May last year,” Pelea said.
”I don’t have a field and I don’t have cash … I’ve depended on neighbours who have been benefiting from WFP [targeted] food distributions. But sometimes, usually one day a week, I go without food for the whole day — but I know that the following day someone will give me something,” she added.
In 2002 she was part of a food-for-work programme, but was unable to continue due to ill health. ”I went to the doctor because I was not well, and the doctor told me I was too weak for work. I could no longer participate in the project,” she said.
Since dropping out of the food-for-work project Pelea has not benefited directly from any other aid programme. She was at the WFP post-distribution monitoring visit in Makhoathi in a bid to get on the list of vulnerable people benefiting from the VGF distributions.
Both Pelea and Mojakisane appear to have slipped through gaps in social safety net programmes.
”I’ve received no grants or help from anybody,” said Pelea. ”Usually the people who help me are the people I attend church with. If they die then there’s nobody to help me.”
In one of the areas Irin visited, a community member said many of those without food at home made a point of regularly attending funerals, so they could at least get a meal that day.
Earlier this year, after a third poor harvest, the Lesotho government appealed for food aid for some 600 000 people. It is now predicted that up to 948 000 people — nearly half the population — will experience food shortages. — Irin