Flooded West and Central Africa face critical food shortages

Dana — Souloukna Mourga plodded through his flooded millet-and-cotton field in northern Cameroon and uprooted soggy stems containing a few bolls. All six hectares of mostly dead crops were submerged.

The 50-year-old father of 12 is one of an estimated 4-million people, many of them subsistence farmers, in more than a dozen countries in West and Central Africa whose crops have been decimated by unusually heavy flooding.

The floods have destroyed the season’s harvest, while almost 1-million hectares of farmland across the region remain under water, and with soil nutrients being washed away an even worse crop is likely next season.

Around Mourga’s farm in Dana village on the floodplain of the Logone River bordering Cameroon and Chad, hundreds of hectares of crops and dotted huts in hamlets are still submerged.

“I have nothing left. We are facing famine. I have two wives and 12 children. The water has taken everything,” Mourga said.

About 300km north of Dana, on the floodplain between the Logone and Chari rivers in Chad, it took Bernadette Handing, 37, two hours in a canoe to reach her flooded millet farm in Kournari, south of the Chadian capital, N’Djamena.

“What I was able to save from the farm cannot support our family for a month. What is certain, we will die of hunger in winter,” she said.

Before the floods, the West and Central Africa region was already facing a bleak food security situation, said Sib Ollo of the World Food Programme.

Prolonged drought last year, conflict in the Sahel region that has displaced about 8-million people — most of them farmers — along with the pandemic that had disrupted farming, and fallout from the Ukraine crisis which curbed fertiliser supplies to the region, meant crop output already was going to be low.

“It is an unprecedented situation,” Ollo said. “This is a perfect storm of factors all playing and leading us towards a catastrophe, a major crisis.”

The number of people in food insecurity and needing aid in the region was more than 40-million before the floods, said Kouacou Dominique Koffy, head of the West Africa emergency and resilience team for the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Koffy said 80% of those recently displaced were agro-pastoral farmers and it would take time for them to return, and the water to recede, so they could resume farming.

Next season

In Nigeria, floods have destroyed more than 570,000 hectares of farmland, said Sadiya Umar Farouq, minister of humanitarian affairs and disaster management. In the northeastern and middle-belt states, where most of the country’s food is grown, crops such as rice, maize and small grains are lost.

Edwin Chigozie Uche, president of Nigeria’s Maize Growers and Processors Association said preliminary reports show as much as 30% of the maize crop in the two regions could have been lost to floods, warning of possible food shortages.

“We have started taking soil samples in areas where floods have receded to check the level of nutrients. It will take some time for farmers to get back to farming,” Uche said.

Goni Alhaji Adam, who chairs the Associations of Sorghum Producers, Processors and Marketing for the northeastern Borno state, said the flooding was the worst he had seen in two decades.

“We are very worried about farming next year due to the devastating floods. The possibility of not being able to farm is very high, because the topmost layer of the soil, which consists of high nutrients has been washed away.”

Many of those affected are small-scale farmers who can’t afford soil fertility tests and other farm management methods and will not be able to cultivate next year without support. Even if they get the support, the fear is that this may not be enough, he said.

Reuters