Maputo, 14 Aug (AIM) – Over 100,000 people in the central Mozambican province of Manica are at risk of food insecurity as a result of large scale drought caused by the “El Niño” weather phenomenon.
According to Dionísio Rapeque, head of the Food and Nutrition Security department at the Manica Provincial Directorate of Agriculture and Fisheries, cited by the Portuguese News Agency Lusa, of this number, 49,000 people are already in need of food assistance.
“These 49,000 people are in need of food, but we have some left over. Now that we’re going into the 2024/2025 agricultural campaign, if they don’t have food, it means they won’t have seeds. All the stocks of seeds are gone”, he said.
According to Rapeque, the situation is caused by the poor production recorded in the 2023/2024 agricultural season, due to the impacts of the El Niño phenomenon, which affected the districts of Machaze, Tambara, Guro and Macossa.
He also said that ‘seeds will be distributed to the affected families for the next agricultural campaign’.
Mozambique is considered one of the countries most severely affected by global climate change, facing cyclical floods and tropical cyclones during the rainy season, which runs from October to April.
El Niño is a change in atmospheric dynamics caused by an increase in the surface temperature of the southern Pacific.
In addition to affecting agricultural crops, El Nino has been contributing to a sharp drop in the level of water in Cahora Bassa lake, the reservoir behind the Cahora Bassa dam on the Zambezi river, in the central Mozambican province of Tete.
This meteorological phenomenon is also causing torrential rains in East Africa, which has already caused hundreds of deaths in Kenya, Burundi, Tanzania, Somalia and Ethiopia.
(AIM)
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