Three million Malawians face starvation

Lilongwe, Malawi – The Circle for Integrated Community Development (CICOD), a local Malawian NGO established to empower poor marginalized communities to fight the impact of poverty has joined the southern African nation’s President Peter Mutharika in calling for urgent local and international assistance following a warning that 2, 833, 212 people face starvation..

An annual vulnerability assessment conducted by the Ministry of Finance, Economic Planning and Development, through the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC) between 8th to 26th June, 2015 revealed that 17% of the country’s total population will not be able to meet their daily dietary requirements because of a drop in yields this year.

According to a MVAC press statement: “The total maize requirement to assist the affected population is estimated at 124,183 MT (with an estimated cash equivalent of MK18.6 billion)”.

CICOD Executive Director Amos Tizora said that according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development crop production estimates show that the country has produced an estimated 2,776,277 MT during the 2014/2015 cropping season, a 30.2% drop over last year’s maize production of 3,978,123 metric tons.

He noted that all this is a result of the violent floods and wash-always which killed one hundred and one people, displaced 172 and distressed 886, 204 while a prolonged dry spells and early cessation of rains affected 1,947, 009 people across the country.

“As CICOD, we would like ask the world touch the lives of all people whose livelihood has been exposed and is left vulnerable to the situation,” he said requesting individuals, governments, charity Organisations and companies to provide food and nutrition security by generously donating in cash or kind in order to fill the people’s dietary needs.

He said his organization has vast experience in relief distribution and will also engage the exposed families with livelihood security programmes and projects to improve sustainable agricultural production, increase food and income security, Environmental Management, Gender, HIV/AIDS, Youth, Human Rights, Water and Sanitation, Nutrition, Capacity Development of Micro-finance institutions, Support to Credit and Savings Initiatives.

Malawi is a landlocked country. It has a population of about 16 million people, of which 90 per cent reside in the rural and depend on subsistence farming. At a rate of 6.3 per cent, people in this southern Africa country are fleeing rural poverty to seek for good health, education, and employment opportunities in the cities of Blantyre, Lilongwe, Mzuzu and Zomba and other small urban towns.
 
Agriculture is the engine of Malawi’s economy, employing the majority of the labour force. Seventy per cent of full time farmers are women and they perform 87% of agricultural labour.
 
The doubling of the population over the last twenty years has exerted extreme pressure on land and natural resources, national and household food security, the labour market, and on the provision of essential social services.
 
Poverty in Malawi is deep, severe and widespread. Approximately 65 per cent of the rural population lives in poverty. The urban poverty rate is 55% while that of the rural is 67%. The mostly vulnerable include; small land owners with less than one hectare of land, estate workers, and estate tenants, the urban poor and female/orphaned headed households.
 
The key causes of poverty in Malawi are vulnerability to shocks, limited access to land, low education, poor health status, limited off-farm employment and lack of access to credit facilities – Hyphen News