Political Unrest Leaves Burundi Facing Food Shortage
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Tags: Burundi, Food and Agriculture Organization, Food Shortage, Political Unrest
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About 2.3 million people in Burundi are staring in the face of a severe food shortage this year, UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned Tuesday.
The Crop Prospects and Food Situation report released by FAO indicates that civil insecurity and an economic downturn caused disruption to markets, farming activities and livelihoods in the East African nation led to the current shortage.
This is in addition to limited humanitarian assistance and Burundi’s declining food import capacity.
“Despite the recent favourable “2016B season” harvest, the number of severely food insecure people continues to escalate as a consequence of displacements and poor macroeconomic conditions. The continuing depreciation of the local currency and the low foreign reserves is also severely reducing the country’s capacity to import food,” the UN body said in the report.
Households in Kirundo, Muyinga, Rutada and Makamba provinces, as well as rural locales near Bujumbura, are particularly affected.
The food crisis comes in spite of abundant and well-distributed rains in April and May that favoured crop development in farming regions of both Rwanda and Burundi.
Burundi is one of the countries in the region where conflict and effects of La Niña have pushed the number of those in need of humanitarian aid to 40 per cent.
According to FAO, 28 African nations currently are in need of external assistance, with the East African region alone having over 24 million people who are in need of humanitarian help.
Particularly, the report indicates that an estimated 5.9 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance in eastern and southern conflict-affected provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo where a mass influx of refugees, fleeing Burundi and South Sudan, is straining the already limited resources of host communities.
