Central African Republic News Gazette

An estimated 250 million people in Africa lack access to daily food, with the number impacted in west and central Africa expected to reach a record high. Officials and aid groups from more than 50 African countries meet this week in Equatorial Guinea to discuss ways of improving the continent’s agricultural food systems.

The U.N. World Food Program says the number of people affected by the ongoing food crisis in west and central Africa has quadrupled over the last three years, rising from 10.7 million in 2019 to 41 million today.

Countries in the Horn of Africa are also experiencing one of their worst food crises following three consecutive poor rainy seasons.

The food insecurity has caused a massive nutrition crisis, particularly among small children. It has also fueled a huge population displacement as people leave rural areas in search of better economic opportunities.

Many factors are at play. Extreme weather events such as drought and floods are occurring more regularly. In some countries, conflict prevents farmers from planting or harvesting crops.

As a result, many African countries have become increasingly reliant on food imports. So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and disrupted global and regional trade, the continent suffered.

Abebe Haile-Gabriel is the assistant director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

“Each time a new crisis hits, it adds to what is already a very precarious situation. And the economic base is not very strong. Productivity and production of food is one of the lowest in the world. Not enough is being produced,” said Haile-Gabriel.

The situation has been further complicated by the war in Ukraine. More than 20 African countries depend on Ukraine or Russia or both for wheat imports, Haile-Gabriel said, including 13 which depend on the warring nations for more than half of their annual wheat supply. Many African countries are also heavily reliant on fertilizer imports from Russia.

Benoît Thierry is the West Africa representative for the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

“In Africa, not all countries are self-sufficient. Senegal is importing 50% of its food and we think that all the governments should now get organized to ensure self-sufficiency in their countries. And for that you need investment plans in agriculture,” he said.

Past agricultural plans have had a scope of three to five years, Thierry said, but governments should be thinking longer term.

At this week’s U.N. food conference, government officials are expected to discuss ways of decreasing Africa’s dependence on imports by providing emergency support to farmers, taking advantage of the African continental free trade agreement, and investing in ecosystem restoration and resource management.

Source: Voice of America

President Muhammadu Buhari vowed on Tuesday there would be no mercy for those behind the killings of more than 100 people in a series of attacks in central Nigeria.

Gunmen raided and ransacked a group of villages there, local sources said, in one of worst attacks this year blamed on heavily armed criminal gangs.

Condemning what he called the heinous killings, Buhari promised that the perpetrators would receive “no mercy.”

“They should not be spared or forgiven,” he said in a statement.

Sunday’s attacks in Plateau State and a high-profile kidnapping raid on a train in neighboring Kaduna State have highlighted intensifying insecurity in northwest and central regions of Africa’s most populous nation.

On Sunday, gunmen attacked more than four villages in Plateau, leaving more than 100 people dead with scores of homes destroyed, two local community leaders and the commander of a local vigilante force said Tuesday.

Details of the attack were still sketchy, with local officials and security forces confirming the assault but declining to give a death toll.

“Many people were killed with houses and properties destroyed,” Plateau State Governor Simon Bako Lalong said in a statement that condemned the violence but gave no precise toll.

One local community leader, Malam Usman Abdul, told AFP on Monday that 54 bodies were found at Kukawa village, 16 local vigilantes were also found dead at Shuwaka village, 30 villagers were recovered at Gyambahu and four more were found around other villages.

“People are still looking for their family members,” he said.

Bala Yahaya, operational commander of the local vigilantes who work with security forces told AFP they had recovered 107 bodies, including 16 members of his group.

Another community leader gave a similar figure for the number of fatalities.

Residents said there were mass burial services on Monday for the victims of the attack in four adjoining villages.

Security forces and local government officials did not respond to requests for confirmation of a toll.

Major Ishaku Takwa, military spokesman, said on Monday that many villages had been ransacked but that the number of casualties was still being verified.

Northwest and central states in Nigeria have long struggled with a security crisis that has emerged from tensions and clashes between farmers and herders over water and land.

Tit-for-tat revenge killings spiraled into broader criminality as gangs known locally as bandits with hundreds of members targeting villages for raids, mass kidnapping and looting.

Despite a military campaign to flush them out of their forest hideouts, attacks by bandit gangs have intensified.

Last month, gunmen blew up rail tracks and attacked a train between the capital Abuja and the northwestern city of Kaduna, killing eight people and abducting an unspecified number of other passengers.

They later released videos showing their hostages.

The train attack came two days after bandits killed a security guard at the perimeter fence of Kaduna’s airport, prompting two local airlines to temporarily halt flights into the city.

Nigeria’s overstretched security forces are already battling a grinding 12-year jihadi insurgency in the country’s northeast, where Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province are operating.

The conflict has killed more than 40,000 people and forced around 2.2 million more people to flee their homes since it erupted in Borno State in 2009.

Source: Voice of America

U.N. agencies are calling on international donors to act now and provide the funds needed to prevent another potentially devastating famine in Somalia. Millions of Somalis are in need of life-saving assistance.

Three years of extreme drought has brought Somalia to its knees. Some six million people or 40 percent of the population are facing acute hunger because the rains have failed, their crops have withered, and their livestock has died.

The United Nations says three quarters of a million people have been forced to leave their homes in search of food for themselves and grazing land for their cattle. Last week, a U.N. food security report stated that Somalia is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster.

Etienne Peterschmitt is the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization representative in Somalia. Speaking from the capital, Mogadishu, Peterschmitt says some 81,000 people already are suffering from catastrophic conditions in some areas of the country. He says they are facing starvation, malnutrition, loss of livestock, crops, other assets, and eventually disease and death.

“Almost quarter of a million people died the last time famine was declared in Somalia,” Peterschmitt said. “And with the current likelihood of poor rain, skyrocketing food prices, and a huge funding shortfall as was already mentioned also, it means a perfect storm is brewing for another catastrophic event in which millions of people are at risk of sliding into famine.”

Children accounted for nearly half of the quarter-million people who died in Somalia’s last famine in 2011. So far, the U.N.’s $1.4 billion 2022 Humanitarian Response Plan for Somalia is less than five percent funded.

The World Food Program’s deputy country director in Somalia, Lara Fossi, says her agency must make some hard choices on how to distribute aid because of a lack of money.

“We have already prioritized our very limited nutrition funding to treat malnutrition rather than to prevent it,” said Fossi. “And this, of course, will mean that more people are likely then to fall into needing treatment for acute malnutrition in the longer term…and we are taking from the hungry to feed the starving.”

Fossi warns the threat of famine may force people into negative coping strategies, like selling off livestock and other assets. That, she says, will undermine their long-term ability to support themselves and force them to remain dependent on humanitarian relief.

Source: Voice of America

Former President Barack Obama “pivoted” towards Africa, his predecessor Donald Trump away from it, and current U.S. leader Joe Biden has had his hands full with the pandemic at home and now the war in Ukraine.

But in an address to lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week, the commander for U.S. forces in Africa pointed to China’s dominance in a region vital to America’s security and economic growth, and warned that Washington ignores Africa at its peril.

“China’s heavy investment in Africa as its ‘second continent,’ and heavy-handed pursuit of its ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative, is fueling Chinese economic growth, outpacing the U.S., and allowing it to exploit opportunities to their benefit,” AFRICOM Commander General Stephen Townsend told the House Committee on Appropriations, echoing comments he made last month to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Townsend’s remarks come amid a burst of Chinese diplomacy with the continent. Foreign Minister Wang Yi — who has visited three countries in Africa this year — met with seven African counterparts in March alone. Last month, President Xi Jinping had what was billed as a “productive” telephone call with Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the region’s most developed economy, South Africa.

There’s been speculation that China may simply be trying to shore up support for its position on the Ukraine crisis, with Townsend noting: “Our African partners face choices to strengthen the U.S. and allied-led open, rules-based international order or succumb to the raw power transactional pressure campaigns of global competitors.”

Deborah Brautigam, director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, told VOA that China is trying to create a “non-aligned” axis as “Beijing does not want the Ukraine war to become a new Cold War with countries forced to choose between the U.S. and Russia.”

But China’s interest in Africa long predates the war in Ukraine.

Townsend noted the region is home to rare earth metals used for mobile phones, hybrid vehicles, and missile guidance systems, and stressed that “the winners and losers of the 21st century global economy may be determined by whether these resources are available in an open and transparent marketplace or are inaccessible due to predatory practices of competitors.”

West Africa base worries?

The continent also occupies a key geostrategic location. Townsend expressed concern that China — which already has a naval base at the mouth of the Red Sea in Djibouti — is looking at setting up another on the Atlantic coast. That, he said, would “almost certainly require the [Defense] department to consider shifts to U.S. naval force posture and pose increased risk to freedom of navigation and U.S. ability to act.”

Brautigam says she doubts it is in China’s interest to “carve out a threat posture in the Atlantic.”

She told VOA that “with continued terrorism and instability in Nigeria, Cameroon and other parts of the Gulf of Guinea, that area has become the world’s hotspot for piracy.” For China, as the world’s largest trading nation, “that’s reason enough to want an outpost to protect Chinese citizens and economic interests in the Gulf of Guinea.”

An op-ed in China’s state-affiliated Global Times in January appeared to echo this line of reasoning, noting that compared to hundreds of U.S. bases around the world, China only has one and its need for any more would purely be to “ensure local security and interests.”

Another piece in the paper insisted: “China is the most cautious and restrained in terms of overseas military base deployment, as China does not have a desire to project military power globally to support the strategic competition of major powers.”

“Nevertheless, as China’s overseas interests continue to expand, there will be an increasing need for the Chinese PLA Navy to defend the national interests in more distant regions, inevitably demanding footholds in some distant waters,” it read.

While China plays down any ambitions to build a West Africa base, a State Department spokesperson told VOA: “It is widely understood that they are working to establish a network of military installations. … Certain potential steps involving PRC-basing activity would raise security concerns for the United States.”

Debt trap accusations

As the two superpowers vie for influence in Africa, Beijing is regularly accused by the West of providing “debt trap” loans to countries on the continent and of working with some of the region’s less savory leaders.

Government mouthpieces like the Global Times and Xinhua reject those allegations, with one op-ed in March countering: “While China offers financial supports and affordable proposals to local economies to build up economic strength to weather challenges, some developed countries have only offered aid with political strings attached.”

And, in a recent interview with a Kenyan newspaper, The East African, China’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa Xue Bing blamed instability in that region on Western foreign intervention. “China will send out engineers and students. We don’t send out weapons. We don’t impose our views on others in the name of democracy or human rights,” he told the newspaper.

Asked if China has already outplayed America on the continent, the State Department spokesperson said: “The United States does not want to limit African partnerships with other countries. The United States wants to make African partnerships with the United States even stronger.”

But Brautigam said that aside from foreign aid, China is a bigger economic player on the continent than the U.S. in every area, adding: “It’s not clear that Washington has pivoted to Africa beyond rhetoric.”

Source: Voice of America

More than 7 million South Sudanese will be facing a food crisis by July because of floods, drought and armed clashes.

Food insecurity has worsened since last year. Increased armed violence, population displacement, and climatic shocks such as floods and droughts have played a role, the United Nations and South Sudan government said Saturday in a joint report.

Some 87,000 people in the Pibor Administrative area and parts of Jonglei, Lakes and Unity states are likely to be at catastrophic levels of famine by July. About 2.9 million people will be just one step lower, at emergency levels, according to an analysis of Integrated Food Security Phase Classification data.

More than two-thirds of the population — almost 9 million people — need humanitarian assistance, the U.N. said.

Last year, 5.3 million South Sudanese received food, health, and water and sanitation services as well as education, livelihoods and nutrition assistance.

“We will continue to have the situation we have in South Sudan if we don’t start to make that transition to ensuring peace at the community levels,” U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in South Sudan Sara Beysolow Nyanti said.

According to Saturday’s report, Unity, Jonglei, Upper Nile, Warrap and Eastern Equatoria states will suffer the most from the food shortages.

“Until conflict is addressed, we will continue to see these numbers increase because what it means is that people do not have safe access to their lands to cultivate,” said Adeyinka Badejo, World Food Program acting country director in South Sudan.

South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 and has struggled with political and economic crises since then. A five-year civil war killed almost 400,000 people.

Although a 2018 cease-fire and power-sharing deal between President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar is still in place, the conflict continues. The U.N. has criticized both leaders for incentivizing violence and corruption.

The U.N. Mission in South Sudan has increased the number of peacekeepers it has deployed and is working with communities in Leer in Unity State to ease ongoing tensions. They are working with local authorities to protect displaced families and provide them with access to clean water and health care.

The South Sudan People’s Defense Forces are also reportedly working in Leer to restore order amid the growing humanitarian crisis stemming from the worst flooding in decades.

Source: Voice of America