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Research and experience has it that in times of food shortages households develop certain sequential strategies and behaviours to help them slog through the lean spell.
As a first step, households change their diets. This involves switching their consumption patterns from preferred foods to cheaper, less preferred substitutes. If, for example, a family ate meat daily they can move to vegetables during a drought.
Second, the household can attempt to increase their food supplies using short-term strategies that, however, can be unsustainable in the long term. Examples include buying on credit, borrowing from relatives friends or from those in the business of lending.
Extreme examples may include begging or consuming wild foods, immature crops, or even seed stocks. Third, households can try to reduce the number of people that they have to feed. They can achieve this by sending some of them elsewhere such as sending children to neighbours when those neighbours are eating.
Fourth, and most common, households can attempt to manage the food deficit by rationing the limited stocks available. This entails cutting the portion size or the number of meals, favouring certain household members over others, or skipping whole days without eating.
In more desperate situations, particularly in some traditional settings in Africa, hungry households have a tendency of marrying off their daughters to not only subtract one mouth that has to be fed, but also to receive payment from the often wealthier man who takes her in.
Generally, families tend to give their younger children first preference in terms of food distribution and portion size whereas the older family members take smaller portions and eat fewer times. This means that while the younger family members are more susceptible to shocks arising from food shortage, they tend to be, by and large, healthier than the older members of the same families.
In Binga, Matabeleland North Province we have a situation where, according to a recent United Nations study, about 18,000 children are malnourished. This concerns us a lot when so many of our children are malnourished. According to the UN Resident Coordinator, Bishow Parajuli, 22,000 children were sampled at Simatelele Clinic and of these, 18,000 were found to be severely malnourished.
He said Binga was in dire need of food, animal feed and water.
“The delegation visited a clinic in Simatelele to observe how the health service is coping with the drought situation,” he said. “The Simatelele Clinic supported by Save the Children and the United Nations agencies (UNFPA, UNAids, Unicef, UN Women, WHO and the World Bank) is tackling an increase in cases of malnutrition (regularly screening over 18,000 children monthly out of a total 22,000 children). The clinic showed that due to the prevailing unprecedented drought situation, several hard hit localities have become hotspots of high malnutrition. The farming communities have lost their harvest to drought and had no chance of replanting. The situation in Binga District calls for an increased and continued humanitarian assistance, including food, nutrition, school meal, animal feed and water.”
It worries us more because, according to The Coping Strategies Index we highlighted early on, the impact of food insecurity tends to manifest itself in children much later than in older people. Therefore, this suggests that the health status of most people in Binga is bad and, extrapolating from the results of that study, the prevailing food shortage countrywide is posing grave health implications on the population.
About four million people are in need of urgent food aid as the country battles its second successive drought, our worst in 20 years. At least $1,5 billion is needed to buy the food.
The Binga experience exhorts the government and its partners to intensify strategies to make food available to the hungry, with particular focus on children. They are a special class that needs targeted attention. If 18,000 kids at one clinic are severely malnourished, how many more are in the same, or worse, predicament nationwide?
The nation indeed has an enormous food supply challenge.
The implications of hunger on a young person are greater than in a grown up person. He or she may not regain his or her mental and physical shape even into adulthood. Amid hunger pangs, the child is unable to concentrate at school, thus may fail at examinations, which puts their long-term futures at risk.
We urge authorities to scale up supplementary feeding programmes for younger children in primary school. Ordinary foods may not be of immediate benefit, so provision of fortified foods for them would be the better way forward. When children get enough nutritious food from donors and the government, households would have enough room to concentrate their efforts on mobilising resources to feed the older members of the family.
Online Reporter