Mozambique: Scholarship students will fly to Brazil on Sunday with EMOSE support - reports
The Mozambican government has revealed that 518 tonnes of food aid has been distributed to 46,900 people affected by the severe drought in the southern and central regions of the country.
Speaking at the end of the weekly meeting of the Council of Ministers (Cabinet), the government spokesperson, Deputy Health Minister Mouzinho Saide, explained that these figures relate to the period from 21 June to 10 July.
He added that the distribution of food was one part of the programme to mitigate the effects of the drought. Other actions include the rehabilitation of water boreholes for human and animal consumption and small scale irrigation in the drought-stricken areas.
During the period under review, four boreholes were rehabilitated in Inhambane province, bringing the number of water sources rehabilitated in Inhambane and Gaza provinces to 102 since March.
According to Saide, it was reported to the Council of Ministers that the El Nino weather phenomenon is gradually fading.
He added that taking account of the National Meteorology Institute (INAM) forecast that rainfall will be normal to above normal during the next rainy season, with the strong likelihood of floods, the government has already begun to prepare a contingency plan.
Drought has affected an estimated 40 million people across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.
According to a press release from SADC, more than 23 million people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. It adds that later this month, the SADC chairperson Ian Khama, who is also President of Botswana, will declare a regional disaster and launch a regional appeal for humanitarian and recovery support amounting to 2.7 billion US dollars.
The appeal will be a formal request to the international community to provide assistance to affected member states.
Five SADC states have already declared national drought emergencies – Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. In addition, South Africa has declared an emergency in eight of its nine provinces, and Mozambique has declared a red alert in its southern and central provinces.
The statement adds, “for SADC, the current El Nino-induced drought is the worst in 35 years, following the failure of two consecutive rainy seasons. The severe drought conditions have already taken its toll on lives and livelihoods and the situation could deteriorate further if urgent assistance is not provided”.
El Nino is characterised by an abnormal warming of the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean and has a significant effect on weather around the world. The term was first used at the end of the 19th Century to describe a warm current off the coast of Peru at Christmas.
In Mozambique, El Nino is associated with drought during what is normally the wettest period – January to March. El Nino has been blamed for the serious food shortages in much of southern and central Mozambique in 2002 and for the severe drought which devastated the country in 1992.
In April, Mozambique declared a 90-day institutional red alert, the highest state of disaster alert, in the southern and central provinces. Data for the 2015-16 agricultural campaign show a harvest of 2.39 million tonnes of grain – a decline of 4.8 per cent on the 2015 harvest of 2.51 million tonnes. This was largely due to the drought, although storms and flooding in the north of the country also contributed to crop losses.
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