Fears are growing that Mozambique faces its worst floods, while a new report has found that most households affected by flooding last year are yet to recover and are experiencing severe food insecurity.
During last year’s floods government authorities moved affected people to resettlement areas on higher ground. More than 80% of households in resettlement areas and 75% outside them face extreme food shortages, says a new Save the Children United Kingdom report.
”The situation has not changed much — the affected people remain vulnerable until the next harvest in March or April,” said Chris McIvor, director of Save the Children UK.
A red alert was issued on January 3 after heavy rains caused a sharp rise in water levels in the Zambezi, Pungue, Buzi and Save rivers. Mozambique’s disaster management agency, INGC, estimates that about 56 000 people are affected, including 13 000 who were relocated to resettlement centres.
”We are concerned that we could be facing worse floods than 2007 — the Cahora Bassa Dam [on the Zambezi River in Tete Province in the north-west] has been forced to increase its discharges to 6 000 cubic metres a second — while the inflow is 7 600 cubic metres a second — to cope with a massive inflow of water into Cahora Bassa lake from Zambia and Zimbabwe,” McIvor said.
The amount of water discharged should be the same as the inflow. ”We are only at the beginning of the rainy season and these were the figures when we had the flooding in February and March last year,” he said.
About 285 000 people were affected and 29 killed in the Zambezi River basin last year during the worst floods to hit the country in six years.
Besides the threat of flooding by water discharged from the Cahora Bassa Dam, Zambézia Province, which forms part of the Zambezi River basin, also is affected by rainfall in neighbouring Malawi, where heavy rains have been forecast. — Irin