Rebels Compound Drought Crisis : Delivering Food to Mozambican Poor Is a Risky Business

Just across the Limpopo River from Chokwe, more than 5,500 Mozambique peasants, the victims of five years of drought, are starving, and Red Cross workers cannot take them any of the food stockpiled here from donations from around the world.

“They are at the point where they are eating roots, bark from trees, leaves, whatever they can find,” said Birgitte Bay, a Danish nutritionist working in Chokwe for the League of Red Cross Societies. “We have food for them, we could save them--but we can’t get to them.

“That’s bandit country across the Limpopo. If we put a truck across--and we have tried--we will probably lose the truck, the driver, the food and our Red Cross volunteers. And if any of the food does reach those peasants, the armed bandits will attack them, take the food and probably kill them. It is a desperate, maddening situation.”

The little drama at Chokwe--starving peasants on one side of the river and food on the other--is repeated across war-torn Mozambique in scores of places as guerrillas of the rightist Mozambique National Resistance--regarded as “armed bandits” by the country’s Marxist government--prevent the distribution of food to tens of thousands of starving peasants.

Toll Nearly 200,000

Mozambique’s 14.3 million people are emerging from a famine that, at its peak 18 months ago, killed an estimated 100,000 in a year and since 1981 has probably killed nearly 200,000, according to the government.

But the food crisis here continues. Nearly 2 million Mozambicans will survive only with international assistance next year; more than a third of the children are severely malnourished, and present government estimates put the country’s grain deficit at 400,000 tons, much higher than originally anticipated.

“We still need food, although the situation has improved compared to a year ago when we had 4 million, 4 1/2 million on the edge of starvation,” Amos Mahanjane, director of Mozambique’s Department for the Prevention and Combatting of Natural Calamities, said in an interview in Maputo, the capital. “The countryside is now very green, it is true, and the harvest appears to be good, better than it actually is. . . . But we could still have very serious problems in some areas and a difficult situation overall.”

Five of Mozambique’s 10 provinces are still considered drought-stricken, according to Mahanjane, but conditions are improving after three good rains earlier this year. The situation in Sofala province in the center of the country along the coast of the Indian Ocean remains serious, and mounting problems in Maputo province around the capital have increased difficulties there.

Widespread Malnutrition

“We are no longer in a drought-and-famine situation, but one of widespread malnutrition that is still acute in many places,” Bo Backstrom, chief representative of the League of Red Cross Societies, said in Maputo. “You will see the effects of this drought for a long time, particularly on children. And then there are those pockets of starvation that we must try and reach.”

The meager food rations in Maputo, which is better fed than any other city or town, make clear how relative this improvement is. The monthly ration for each person there is one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of rice, one and a half kilograms of cornmeal flour, a half kilogram of sugar, one liter (one quart) of vegetable oil and 200 grams (7 ounces) of soap--when these commodities are available.

“This is not Ethiopia, not Sudan, not the Sahel, where the tragedy is on such a massive scale,” a British aid worker said, “but when you still have 2 million people dependent for survival on international assistance, you still have a crisis of major proportions.”

But the character of that crisis is changing: It is now much less that of drought and much more one of internal security.

‘Distribution Impossible’

“The drought is ending, the harvest has been good and considerable international assistance is available,” said Glenn Porter, acting director here for the American relief organization CARE, “but we could be in a new emergency situation in a few months because the armed bandits make the normal distribution of food almost impossible. There is food to be distributed, but we can’t get it out everywhere we should. There will be a lot of these pockets of hunger, pockets of starvation around the country.”

The situation in some of those pockets is often quite perilous. At the small settlement of Dindiza, about 100 miles north of Chokwe, for example, more than 16,000 peasants have gathered, waiting for promised relief supplies.

When trucks could not get up the ragged dirt roads, first because of heavy rain and thick mud and later because of guerrilla ambushes, an airlift of food was planned by the Red Cross--and the peasants cleared a landing strip by hand and flattened it with their feet over the past three months.

“We are ready to go if the strip is suitable,” Backstrom of the Geneva-based Red Cross League said in Maputo, “but the military keeps telling us the area is insecure, that the armed bandits could overrun it. . . . Yet, people are probably starving to death while we wait.”

Even around government-held district towns, the guerrillas’ hit-and-run war leaves refugees starving only a few miles from help.

“Severe malnutrition starts maybe 10 or 12 miles outside town,” Ian Bray, head of field operations for the British charity Oxfam, said at Chicualacuala, 200 miles northwest of here on the border with Zimbabwe. “When refugees come in, you see the children’s hair turning red, their arms and legs spindly, their bellies swollen--the whole African malnutrition syndrome--although we have relief supplies here. Why? The trucks can’t get through.”

Nildo Suleiman, the Mozambique Red Cross chief in Chicualacuala, explained: “We cannot make any plans for a relief program based on transporting food to people. Because of the armed bandits’ attacks on our people, one of whom was killed a few weeks ago, it is too dangerous to try and distribute in outlying areas. The people have to come to us even though, we know, this means that some may collapse from weakness on the way.”

A great worry for relief workers, said Marta Mauras, representative of the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is that by gathering peasants for food distribution they are making them targets for the insurgents, who are also without food and lack broad support.

‘What Can We Do?

“It is almost a pattern--as soon as the food and relief supplies have been distributed, there is an attack, sometimes a massacre,” she said in Maputo. “But what can we do? Take precautions, of course, and try to minimize the risk. But we still must take that risk.”

Even in areas where the harvest is good, sufficient to feed not only residents of the area but regions that are still drought-stricken, Mozambique faces yet further difficulties, Mahanjane said, because of the fighting, of poor transport and of other distribution problems.

Northern Tete, for example, has had its best harvest in years, Mahanjane said, and the government could easily feed the drought-affected southern part of the province by buying grain in the north and trucking it south. But without consumer goods to buy, the farmers will not sell their produce because the Mozambique currency in which they would be paid is so devalued that it is almost worthless; instead they will probably sell it across the border in Malawi.

The old rural trading system, which ensured farmers markets for their produce and supplies of seeds, tools and agricultural chemicals as well as consumer goods, has become another casualty of the war, the drought and Mozambique’s changing economic policies over the last decade.

“The government has raised its prices for corn, rice and other crops to encourage greater production,” a French farming adviser here said, “but more money is not an incentive if, in practice, it buys less.”

This was one reason for sharp reductions in the acreage planted this year--state and cooperative farms planted only 45% as much as last year, and peasants perhaps only two-thirds as much--and the government, as a result, must worry about feeding its 2 million urban residents plus the 2 million peasants still in drought-stricken areas.

These and related difficulties are also hampering long-term recovery, according to foreign agricultural advisers, who warn that long-term development projects must be undertaken if “famine is not to become a structural phenomenon in Mozambique,” as one put it. These projects must include rehabilitation of farmlands abandoned because of the drought, replacement of the land lost because of security problems, construction of irrigation and flood-control systems and diversification of crops and livestock.

“Farming in Mozambique depends on nature,” Mahanjane observed. “We can farm when there is rain, but when there is no rain we cannot grow any crops. We have no irrigation system, and although many rivers cross our country the water flows out to sea. This is an inheritance from the colonial power (Portugal), which was here for 500 years and did not manage to establish an irrigation system.”

“After independence in 1975, one of our main aims was to build up irrigation systems and develop other modern support systems for agriculture. These would have solved the problems the people face. We want to be self-sufficient in food, as our country is very rich and fertile and 75% of the population is engaged in agriculture. But all the projects we began were impossible due to the war. . . .”

First, Mozambique found itself in an undeclared war with the white government in neighboring Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

Then it had to battle the rightist guerrillas of the Mozambique National Resistance, which initially had the backing of Rhodesia, then of South Africa and now apparently of Portuguese businessmen who formerly operated here and left when the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique came to power.

“All this fighting has destroyed our economy and made development impossible,” Mahanjane said. “We do have plans for our recovery, for agricultural development, but we need help. Any rehabilitation or development project needs investment, and we have no funds for investment.”

Virtually every major international relief and assistance agency is working here, and Mozambique is receiving aid from both the socialist East and the capitalist West, making it one of the largest recipients of such help in Africa.

The United States, which is providing 155,000 metric tons of food this year and is planning to provide about 70,000 tons in the 1986 fiscal year, has become one of the largest donors, giving Marxist Mozambique $182 million in assistance since it became independent a decade ago.

(The foreign aid bill adopted by the House last week would put a hold, however, on $17 million in U.S. economic aid to Mozambique until the number of Soviet Bloc military advisers here is reduced to 55, the same as the self-imposed limit on U.S. trainers in El Salvador. But emergency food aid is apparently unaffected).

“Mozambique is emerging from this crisis--we are no longer faced with mass starvation as we were a year and a half ago--and the challenge is to ensure that it can survive the next drought without such problems,” Mauras of UNICEF said. “That will require a lot more hard work. Preventing famines is as important as ‘curing’ them, and even harder.”