Long-Term Food Aid for Rwanda Seen : Africa: U.N. mission predicts a sharp drop in farm output because of turmoil, says 2.5 million people will need help.

A U.N. mission has warned of yet another bitter harvest from the murderous ethnic turmoil in Rwanda: catastrophic drops in farm output that necessitate immediate outside food aid for no less than half the population.

As a result of genocide, civil war and a colossal exodus of refugees, this autumn’s crop of cereals and beans in the Central African country will plummet to 40% of last year’s total, U.N. specialists said.

The consequence: Farmers, orphans, the poor and disabled and members of other “vulnerable groups” totaling 2.5 million people will need five months of direct food assistance starting this month, an assessment mission of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program warned.

“We’re looking at a long-term emergency,” said Brenda Barton, Nairobi-based regional information officer for the World Food Program.

Experts at some non-governmental aid organizations questioned the U.N. specialists’ alarming calculations, citing the mission’s own estimate that 2.2 million Rwandans had fled their nation. That enormous outflow should mean that food requirements, like production, have dropped sharply in the violence-racked nation.

“Yes, there are fewer people in the country right now,” said Barton, whose agency functions as the U.N. system’s food aid organization. “But the potential for people to come back is still there. And if they do, how will they survive?”

Moreover, since a separate harvest this winter is dependent on what is gathered now and replanted as seed this month and in October, a drop in output now will ignite a chain reaction of declining food production. The U.N. report said that danger demands “emergency” action.

The failure of what used to be a nearly self-sufficient agricultural sector is only the latest calamity to befall Rwandans. Up to half a million members of the country’s Tutsi minority were annihilated this spring in the swiftest wave of genocide in modern times.

In a three-month war, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front defeated government forces and sent swarms of refugees from the Hutu majority stampeding from the landlocked country into Tanzania and Zaire, where they now hunker in reeking, disease-plagued camps.

The combined effects of lethal violence and mass fear were so potent that only half of the 7.9 million people living in Rwanda at the beginning of the year are still in their homes, the U.N. agricultural mission estimated.

About 10% of the population has been killed, it said. Along with the huge numbers who crossed the borders, an additional 700,000 Rwandans have been displaced inside their country, the specialists estimated. They put the country’s current population at 5 million.

The U.N. agricultural specialists found in their nine-day inspection tour of all but one of Rwanda’s 10 prefectures last month that the large-scale killings and refugee exodus had impeded or completely halted work in the fields. In many places, weeds and pests had overwhelmed the crops.

There were a few bright spots in the report. Its authors said much of Rwanda’s banana, root and tuber crop, including vital staples like potatoes, manioc and sweet potatoes, could be salvaged. But “important losses” are occurring because of looting and premature harvesting by people who have nothing else to eat, the U.N. study said.

It estimated banana production would drop by 27% from last year, while roots and tubers would decline by 30%.

Total grain imports of 156,000 tons will be required to make up this year’s shortfall in production, the mission said. Since civil war, ethnic murder and refugee flight have slashed Rwanda’s tea and coffee exports to negligible levels, “all import requirements will have to be covered by food aid,” it said.

Barton said the World Food Program had previously estimated the number of Rwandans requiring food aid at 1.5 million. Those people already receive assistance through the World Food Program and the International Committee of the Red Cross, she said.

Now, the new, higher estimate of the needy and the likelihood of a succession of poor harvests mean “we have a disaster facing us now, and a disaster facing us later,” Barton said.

One crucial but still unknown factor in the struggle to save Rwanda’s agricultural sector from complete collapse is how successful the Rwandan Patriotic Front will be in enticing Hutu refugees back to their farms and homes.

This week, U.N. officials voiced hopes that farmers who fled into Zaire or Tanzania would return immediately and plant their winter crop before the rainy season begins in earnest later this month.

Otherwise, the winter harvest will be disastrous and Rwanda will need another year’s worth of emergency food aid, said Georgia Shaver, another World Food Program official.

“We are not encouraging them to return so they can support the new government,” Shaver told a news conference Monday in Rome. “We want them to create a healthy farming infrastructure and ensure there isn’t dependency on food aid.”

But World Food Program officials acknowledged they expect only half a million refugees to return home by the year’s end.