Blog by Michelle Carter, CARE Lesotho’s Country Director about Lesotho’s food insecurity, army worms and several other challenges the small kingdom faces.
“A small landlocked country completely surrounded by South Africa, Lesotho receives little attention from the international community and media. But far away from the major humanitarian disasters occurring in the Middle East or in populous African countries, the people in Lesotho have been facing serious food insecurity for the last couple of years, adding to their chronic vulnerability to ill-health, climate change and gender-based violence.
In the cropping season of 2011/2012, a series of droughts, late rains and early frost had a destructive impact on the food situation, especially affecting the rural population. At the time, agricultural production dropped 70 per cent and led to Lesotho’s worst harvest in ten years. As a consequence, there are currently about 275,000 people suffering from hunger and in need of assistance according to the Lesotho Vulnerability Assessment Committee (LVAC). For one of the smallest countries in the world with a population of 2.2 million, this represents one third of the total population.
In August 2012, Prime Minister H.E. Thomas Thabane declared a food crisis situation and called for assistance to help his people manage this period of enhanced food shortage and the resulting price increase. Indeed, the situation has been improving and CARE Lesotho has put much effort into alleviating hunger experienced by many Basotho people. Luckily, this year’s harvest also enhanced food availability for the people of Lesotho.
But in February and March 2013, an outbreak of so-called armyworms caused further trouble for the farmers and the entire population. Armyworms are known to wreak havoc with crops, attacking anything eatable in an area before moving altogether – like an army – to the next spot. In Lesotho, numbers show that a total of over 35,000 hectares of cropped land had been affected by armyworms up to March 2013. Some farmers will not be able to harvest anything this year because their fields were completely wiped out. Thus I have to caution against too much early optimism: This emergency isn’t over yet. People’s reserves and safety nets have been exhausted due to the fall in agricultural production during the last years. The implication of these encouraging production estimates in reducing vulnerability will remain unknown until a detailed assessment is completed and the damage caused by the armyworms assessed.
Even if the food situation will improve again and people will be able to feed themselves and their families, many issues remain to be solved in Lesotho: The small country has the second-highest prevalence of HIV positive people worldwide, with every fourth person in Lesotho infected. This aggravates the situation of the families living in food insecurity even more, since they have to decide whether to buy food or medication.
CARE began working in Lesotho in 1968 and in 2001 it merged offices with CARE South Africa. Although different, the countries share many of the same causes and manifestations of poverty and inequality, including high rates of HIV/AIDS and a lack of access to basic health care and education, which perpetuates cycles of underdevelopment. Young people and women disproportionately share the burden of disease, and lack food, education and livelihoods. CARE works with communities and local organisations within Lesotho and South Africa to implement programs in the areas of health care and HIV/Aids, economic empowerment, democratic governance and food security.”
Please read the story from Ms Mathaba Mnako, a woman from Lesotho whose life has been taking substantial turns during this food crisis in the recent years.
To find out more about Lesotho you can also find CARE Lesotho’s Country Factsheet here.