Den lille fattige bjergenklave inde midt i Sydafrika fik først for megen regn i 2010, så alt for lidt i fjor – resultatet er, at småbønderne nu sælger ud af deres værdier, fordi de ganske enkelt ikke har kunnet høstet noget.
MOHALE’S HOEK, 26 June 2012 (IRIN): Initial estimates of the damage to Lesotho’s already ailing (skrantende) agricultural sector – caused by a year of too much rain followed by a year of too little – suggest that an unprecedented (uden fortilfælde) number of small-scale farmers harvested nothing this year.
Heavy rains and flooding cut Lesotho’s maize production by nearly half during the 2010-11 farming season, causing the price of maize meal to increase by 24 percent between March 2011 and March 2012 and putting a heavy strain on the 40 percent of the population already living in extreme poverty.
The 2011-12 season began with a prolonged period of drought which caused many small-scale farmers not to plant at all rather than gamble scarce resources on crops that would be vulnerable to frost.
As a result, what should be a time of plenty has become an extension of the pre-harvest lean (magre) season for many.
“Worse than last year”
The precise number in need of humanitarian assistance will only become clear when the Disaster Management Authority (DMA) completes its annual food security and vulnerability assessment at the end of June.
But a crop forecast by the Bureau of Statistics has already estimated major declines in both total area planted and yields.
“It is actually worse than last year, and we thought last year was the worst,” said Matseliso Mojaki, the DMA’s acting chief executive.
“Maybe those heavy rains washed away some of the soil nutrients (næringsstoffer) so even those who managed to plant did not get a good yield (afgrøde).”
According to the crop forecast, the overall area planted in the 2011-2012 agricultural year decreased by nearly 40 percent from the previous year and the total expected production of maize, the staple crop, fell by 77 percent. Yields of sorghum and wheat have also declined significantly.
Survival for many of Lesotho’s subsistence farmers has been precarious (usikker) for years as soil erosion resulting from poor farming practices, HIV/AIDS and increasingly unpredictable weather have all taken their toll.
Are selling off their assets
Although 82 percent of Lesotho’s population of 1,8 million engage in some form of agriculture, the amount this contributes to the country’s GDP has declined from 25 percent in the 1980s to 10 percent in the last decade and only 7,7 percent following last year’s floods, according to the Bureau of Statistics.
The cumulative (samlede) effect of two poor or non-existent harvests on top of years of slowly declining productivity has pushed more and more Basotho to start employing what Hassan Abdi, a programme officer with the World Food Programme (WFP) describes as “negative coping mechanisms” such as selling off assets (deres værdier), taking children out of school and reducing meals.
Makhahliso Chabeli, a subsistence farmer from the country’s southeastern Mohale’s Hoek District, has sold off one cow a year over the past four years to pay for her childrens’ schooling.
But following a particularly disastrous farming season and left with just three cattle, she doubts her three younger children will complete secondary school.
No equipment for ploughing
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95735/LESOTHO-Food-security-goes-from-bad-to-worse
