FEWSNET’s prediction of the country’s food situation from January until June says the poorest households, notably in pastoral regions, will be forced to resort to harsh strategies such as selling off their productive assets, cutting food intake, and mass migration to more hospitable areas.

According to the government, erratic or late rains led to a 2009 harvest that was 30 percent less than in recent years, and two million people who would normally still be living off the land are having trouble affording food. Estimates do not take into account the populations living in the remote northern desert regions of Tibesti, Borkou and Ennedi, which cover almost half the country. These sparsely populated regions are readily accessible only by helicopter, and are heavily mined from previous conflicts and have few projects funded by international agencies.

Underweight children

A nutrition survey conducted last December in Bahr El Ghazel, a semi-arid pastoral region in the west of the country, showed that 27 percent of the 687 under five children surveyed were underweight. This is almost double the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization at 15 percent.

Loan Tran-Thanh, the head of Action Against Hunger (ACF) in Chad which conducted the survey, told IRIN the results were alarming.

"This was in the middle of the harvest period when malnutrition rates should be lower than [during] the lean rain season," she said. "If it is already that high in a harvest period, then how bad could it get during the lean period?" In the nearby district of Noukou in western Kanem region bordering Niger, 19 percent of 540 children surveyed had acute levels of malnutrition.
Source: Allafrica