Guillaume Lavallee Yahoo News 11 Oct 09;
LOBIRA BOMA (AFP) – In a rustic village at the foot of a steep mountain, women prepare meals by crushing dried grasses, all there is to eat after drought left over a million people in south Sudan short of food.
"You soak the herbs in water, and then eat. This is what we eat every day," said Juspine Ifuho, showing the fine green powder collected from a hollow in the rock she uses as a mortar.
At the edge of Lobira Boma in East Equatoria state, home of people from the Latuka tribe, a valley extends all the way to the neighbouring mountains.
In these remote regions of south Sudan, farmers depend mainly on rain to grow sorghum, millet and peanuts, but a severe drought in May and June ruined the summer harvest.
"We have nothing else to eat because the harvest is gone. We should buy grain at the market, but we don't have money," said Pilagio Ohiasa, the village's deputy chief, dressed in a (American Football team) Dallas Cowboys T-shirt.
The drought, price rises and the increase in tribal violence all contribute to the severe food insecurity which affects 1.5 million people in south Sudan, according to Michelle Iseminger, director of operations of the World Food Program (WFP) in South Sudan.
"Those who have cows can sell them (to buy food), but not everyone has cows," Ohiasa said.
At the local market, there no fruits or vegetables on the stalls, only bottled water, fizzy drinks and biscuits brought over from Kenya and Uganda through torturous routes and sold at high prices.
"Eastern Equatoria used to be a food basket for all of southern Sudan, but this year is different. We don't have anything at all," said Dennis Okumu, food security and nutrition officer at the Catholic Diocese of Torit.
"The main stable food crop here is sorghum and for people here without sorghum, there is nothing," he told AFP.
The region gets an average of 360 millimetres (14 inches) of rainfall between March and September, but this year there were only 280 mm, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said.
"The big problem is the distribution of the rains," explained Rogerio Bonifacio, of FAO Sudan.
A rainy April followed three parched months which destroyed the crops.
"The month of May was one of the driest in 10 or 15 years," he said.
The vast resource-rich but underdeveloped area is blessed with fertile land. But south Sudan is still trying to recover from a devastating civil war with the north that left two million people dead by its end in 2005.
"South Sudan has a history of war. After the peace agreement in 2005, emphasis was placed on education and basic services. It's only now that agricultural activities are restarting. But the systems in place are not very developed," said March Bloch, regional representative for the Swiss aid agency Caritas.
In Lobira Boma, residents have replanted millet and peanuts on sun-drenched land. They hope for rain... and new food aid.
