The tiny Southern African kingdom of Lesotho has declared a state of emergency over worsening food shortages caused by a drought that is threatening the food supplies of hundreds of thousands of citizens.
More than 400 000 people are predicted to be in need of relief supplies by the end of the year as the impoverished mountainous country of 1,9-million people grapples with its worst drought in decades, according to United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) deputy country director Mads Lofvall.
Lofvall corrected a report by the South African Broadcasting Corporation that 400 000 people were already in need of food aid.
”Come September, when people have run out of the little harvest they have been able to realise, we will start to see an increase in feeding needs,” he said.
Average harvests of the staple maize crop fell by 42% during the 2006/07 growing season.
Lesotho usually imports extra maize from South Africa, but South Africa has also experienced drought, prompting prices to spiral out of reach of poor households.
Lofvall said the WFP was already seeing rising rates of malnutrition among children in recent months.
Food shortages add to the plight of Lesotho’s HIV/Aids sufferers, who need a healthy diet to be able to derive benefit from life-saving antiretroviral drugs. Fourteen percent of the population is infected with HIV/Aids, according to UNAids.
The WFP currently runs two feeding programmes in Lesotho — one to feed 120 000 children in schools in mountainous areas and another for 60 000 particularly vulnerable people, mostly the destitute or HIV patients. — Sapa-dpa