Food help to Africa strained as Covid-19 adds to hunger

Bloomberg

Fatou Fofana used to be able to support herself, her baby daughter and two other children by selling spices and stock cubes on the outskirts of Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s biggest city. But measures to contain the coronavirus have reduced her earnings to about $2 a day, leaving her reliant on local food aid to survive.
The 39-year-old’s market stall was closed by authorities enforcing the country’s lockdown in late March, and trading hours remain restricted more than two months later.
“At the end of the month, my pockets are empty,” she says outside her home on a narrow dirt road in the eastern suburb of Bingerville. A recent package of rice from a non-governmental organisation means she has food for a week, “but I still don’t know for next week, or the weeks to come,” she adds.
Efforts are underway by state authorities, NGOs and international agencies such as the WFP to provide food across the continent, in the knowledge that weaker government-support systems may increase the risk of a poverty boom when compared with Europe and North America. Yet the huge demand means the push is already showing signs of strain.
The coronavirus crisis could put a third of Africa’s 300 million informal jobs in jeopardy as countries impose lockdowns, with an associated ban on work deemed by governments to
be non-essential, according to McKinsey & Co.
Between 9 million and 18 million formal jobs could also be lost, the US consultancy said in a report published in April.
Restrictions on the transportation of goods have depleted stocks and increased the price of food in many urban areas, while school closures have meant that millions of children who typically rely on state feeding plans are left at risk of malnutrition.
“African people are missing income to buy food,” said David Laborde, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.
“We are dealing with a size of the number of poor people in Africa that we’ve never seen before. You are losing your income if you are urban poor and the price of food is increasing, so you are trapped between the rock and the hard place.”
In Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the distribution of rice seized at the country’s land borders, while in Kenya, thousands of vulnerable households have been granted weekly cash stipends to sustain them during the pandemic.
In West Africa, which accounts for more than a third of all coronavirus cases in sub-Saharan Africa, the number of those in need of food assistance may double to 43 million in the next six months, the WFP has warned.
In Ghana, the region’s second-largest economy, there have been widespread reports of food packages of such
poor quality they have been left uneaten.