Nepal:Undying hunger in the hinterland
Karnali Messenger-Karnali Forum for Sustainable development
Marty Logan
14 August 2006
In nepal the narrow trails carved into the steep, emerald hills that
plunge into the winding Karnali River hundreds of metres below,
villagers have one thing on their minds: emergency rice.
Ninety percent of locals met by a group of visitors is either walking
briskly to the airfield in Kolti to collect the 40-kg bags of rice or
trudging home with the white sacks strapped to their backs. They move
in small groups: men wearing narrow trousers, long-sleeved shirts and
vests and patterned Nepali topis on their heads; women with bright
handkerchiefs tied in their hair and circular rings in their noses; all
sporting cheap canvas running shoes or plastic sandals.
Richard Ragan wishes he could drum up such interest in the rice in
Kathmandu. Country director of the United Nations World Food Programme
(WFP) in Nepal, Ragan has been soliciting donations to finance an
emergency operation (EMOP) in 10 districts in the country's northwest
for months -- but has raised only 17 percent of his 5.4 million dollar
budget.
"We've certainly been vocal about the crisis, but this area has food
shortages regularly so we have to work harder to overcome scepticism
that this year is different," said Ragan in an interview in Nepal's
capital.
Birjit Katal has no doubts. "I've never seen drought like this in 50
years," says the porter sitting on a rock to smoke his hookah at the
foot of the Pilichaur suspension bridge a few hours walk from Kolti,
where the narrow, swollen Karnali laps at its banks like an ocean.
Asked what they need most right now, besides the rice, Katal and his
porter colleagues respond immediately: irrigation and seeds.
In development terms, Bajura and surrounding districts are "food
deficit areas": places where locals do not grow enough crops in the
best of times to feed themselves. To make ends meet they work for daily
wages, borrow from wealthy villagers or migrate to neighbouring India
to toil as manual labourers for five or six months.
The WFP has long provided rice to villagers here in exchange for work
such as road-building or if they send their children to school
regularly. This year, for the first time, the agency decided that after
the driest winter on record had withered most of the wheat crop, the
"food gap" between harvests had grown so dangerously wide that it would
provide locals with emergency rations.
WFP identified 70 needy village development committees (VDCs) in the 10
districts, where households would receive 80 kg of rice -- half before
starting a "food for work" project and half when finished -- and 7 kg
of fortified flour. Then it began looking for cash to buy and transport
the grain. With no early pledges, it borrowed 543 metric tonnes of rice
from the Nepal Food Corporation and 500,000 dollars from an internal
account.
Now it cannot even pay back those loans, let alone begin phases two and
three of the EMOP: shipping food to six districts even more remote than
Bajura (mostly by helicopter).
Only the United States and Australia have pledged to EMOP, and Ragan is
warning that without more money he will have to prematurely end the
operation without having helped the districts where the need is
arguably the greatest.
Not that there is excess here in Bajura, the second poorest of Nepal's
75 districts according to CARE-USA. A day's walk from Kolti, in Sapata
VDC, a visitor opens the food cupboard in Maghi Dhami's house to find
only a few utensils at the bottom. Across the dim windowless room, a
few of Dhami's 10 children lean against the only other visible
furniture -- another empty cupboard. "Some days the children eat wild
vegetables, some days they sleep without food," their mother says.
That visit over, the walk resumes, up and down along a trail flanked by
tall, thin cactus plants. Across the river boys are shouting and
manoeuvring buffalo to plough tiny plots of land. After a few hours
locals at another village line up to bless guests by marking their
foreheads with vermillion "tikas". One man approaches a visitor: "Do
you have any medicine for my child's stomach?" he asks.
The nearest health post is a three-hour walk away but the nurse is on
leave for training and the doctor attends only when convenient,
explains a local development worker.
The villages' men, women and children assemble on a large ledge
overlooking the winding Karnali far below. "Long-term development is
needed here," says one man, to applause from his neighbours. "The
irrigation canal is too far away; one should be made closer," he adds.
A woman with a deeply wrinkled face and wild hair explains that they
have been eating lots of wild vegetables but that if it does not rain,
they also dry up. "Many children have died," she adds.
>From 2,000 m, the valley below can be deceiving. Green plots may signal freshly transplanted rice, irrigated land, or on closer inspection, contain stunted maize or millet that will produce little. Observing children is also a puzzle: many have discoloured hair, yellow-orange instead of the usual black, and at least one has a distended stomach; both symptoms could signal minor, or major, health problems.
Evidence here is anecdotal but in the neighbouring districts of Mugu
and Humla, children are dying of malnutrition, says Mireille Seneclauze
of the aid group Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger).
"We've lost some (children) alreadyàthey couldn't be treated on time.
If they could have there's a good chance they would have lived,"
Seneclauze told IPS in an interview in Kathmandu.
In February and March the group assessed 10 VDCs in Humla and Mugu,
concluding that acute malnutrition rates "were more alarming than
expected". In June, it returned to begin treatment -- and found 25
percent more children needing help.
It planned to treat 560 children and women six months pregnant or more,
but logistics problems have resulted in the group working with only 200
children to date and no pregnant women. An unconfirmed number of
children have died.
"What these people really need are development projects but, my god,
where do you start?" says an official at one donor agency interested in
funding the EMOP. "We are planning to get more serious about this
region. But one problem is that for the cost of helping one person
here, you can help two people somewhere else in Nepal."