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Tributes have been paid to former rebel leader John Garang at his funeral in southern Sudan, attended by thousands of mourners including African leaders.

Mark Snelling is a member of the British Red Cross Society’s Emergency Response Unit in Niger.

He has been keeping a diary for the BBC News website.

A huge majority of Uganda’s voters – 92.5% – has supported restoring multi-party politics.However, the turnout from Thursday’s referendum was rather low with about 47% of people voting.

RUMBEK, Sudan — Bakic Magol, a boy of 10, wakes each day on a straw mat in a field of muscular, speckled cattle. Powerful horns tower above him; mounds of steaming dung surround his bare feet.

(Asmara, July 27, 2005) Of all the natural disasters that strike communities and environments, a drought can be the most devastating. If it develops into a full-blown famine or forces people to leave their homes or become dependent on external food aid, drought becomes a humanitarian crisis.

Unlike the more dramatic “acts of God”, such as volcanoes, earthquakes or tsunamis, the full impact of a drought is more closely related to a country’s ability to respond or mitigate the failure of rains.

Fragile state structures, underdeveloped infrastructure, poor agricultural practices and issues of governance are as important in this equation as the absence of water itself.

Travelling around Eritrea, one often finds young boys digging in dry river beds to find water for their bony animals, or a slow procession of donkeys and their owners carrying water home through the heat of the day.

The water table throughout the country has dropped by several meters, relief workers and government officials say, thanks to a drought that has dragged on for years.

“We have had very, very little rain, especially in the past three or four years,” Ali Abdu, Eritrea’s information minister, told IRIN in May. “Almost one-third of our population was attacked by that.”

Some 2.3 million people in Eritrea, almost two-thirds of the population, depend on varying levels of food aid. And although 80 percent of the population is rural, the country only produced 85,000 metric tons (mt) of cereals in 2004 – just 15 percent of its annual requirement and 47 percent of its average harvest over the last twelve years.

One million Eritreans are likely to go hungry this year, unless donors can step up their food aid, a senior government official said.

While it would be easy to pin the blame on long-term drought and the exhaustion of coping strategies, relief workers in Eritrea say these are not the only reasons for the country’s precarious food-security situation.

“Food security is more complicated than getting enough rain, or even producing enough food,” said a relief worker who did not want to be named. He felt that the failure to produce adequate food crops since 1998 was also linked to Eritrea’s conflict with Ethiopia and its preparations to strengthen defenses on the border.

The 1998-2000 Ethiopian-Eritrean border war, which was fought mostly in Eritrean territory, killed between 70,000 and 100,000 people and displaced almost one-third of Eritrea’s population.

It also left behind an unpleasant legacy of mines and battered infrastructure throughout the border region, and especially in Eritrea’s most fertile region in the southwest.

Relations between the two countries have hardly improved since the end of the conflict. When they signed a peace agreement in December 2000, both countries agreed that an independent boundary commission would make a “final and binding” decision on where the border should be.

However, the Boundary Commission decision, produced in April 2002, was later rejected by Ethiopia.

Three years on, the position of both countries remains essentially the same: Ethiopia says it will demarcate the border but would like to negotiate first (although it appears unwilling to do so). Meanwhile, Eritrea refuses to compromise on an international agreement.

So, how has a border dispute affected Eritrea’s rapidly declining food security?

The most obvious impact is the redistribution of resources and manpower: An estimated 300,000 people are currently serving in Eritrea’s military instead of contributing to the country’s economy. In addition, government sources said, the dispute has forced Eritrea to put a lot of its scarce resources into military spending. Along with fuel shortages and rising prices of consumer goods, the already weak economy has declined.

“We are dealing with four years of consecutive drought,” Yemane Gebremeskal, presidential advisor and chief government spokesman, told IRIN in an interview at his office in May. “This [drought] has eroded coping mechanisms and is putting severe pressure on the government. The overall security situation has also [had] an impact.”

Following an assessment visit to Eritrea at the end of 2004, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a January 2005 report: “Due to continued critical shortage of labour, the wage rates this year have been observed to be very high.

“Since farmers cannot afford to pay such high wages […] critical field operations such as weeding have generally been neglected,” the WFP/FAO report added.

A separate report issued in April by the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net), said: “The absence of many young men for national mobilisation reduces the range of household income opportunities and coping strategies, such as livestock-raising and off-farm employment.”

It is important to out that some of Eritrea’s most fertile land is within the Temporary Security Zone (TSZ), a 25-km wide demilitarised zone that runs along Eritrea’s southern boundary and is still patrolled by UN peacekeepers.

The TSZ once accounted for a significant proportion of Eritrean food production. Currently, an estimated 50,000 internally displaced Eritreans live away from the TSZ, unable to return to their ruined villages until the last of the landmines planted there during the war are cleared.

Eritrea’s borders with both Ethiopia and Sudan remain officially closed while tensions in the region persist. The border with Sudan was closed in late 2002, with both sides accusing each other of supporting armed opposition in the other’s territory.

The border closures have affected the agricultural sector in two significant ways, by limiting grazing areas and by restricting access to markets. Pastoralists can no longer follow rains across national boundaries. Regional tensions have severely limited the coping strategies of pastoralists, who were once the powerhouse of Eritrean agriculture. The government has been encouraging pastoralists to settle, but adaptation has not been easy, sources say.

“We have not had a census for a long time, but pastoralism is still a very important sector,” a source said. “Normally, if they move, they go in search of pasture. But now very few are moving because of the closed borders. So the pressure on forage is worse than ever before,” he added.

The closed borders have also blocked a key supply of food, driving food prices higher.

“The loss of access to Ethiopian and Sudanese food markets, on which Eritrea traditionally depended for about one-third of its primary food supply, may have contributed to the current escalation of food grains prices in Eritrea,” said the FEWS Net report.

This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations. IRIN is part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The original article can be seen at http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=48328&SelectRegion=Horn_of_Africa&SelectCountry=ERITREA

Six years after a return to civilian rule, Nigeria’s police still routinely torture detainees, a new report says.
The study, carried out by the Human Rights Watch group, is entitled “Rest in Pieces – Police Torture and Deaths in Custody in Nigeria”.

United Nations Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)

(Mbabane July 28, 2005) Swaziland is in the grip of another food crisis but farmers say they cannot plant more maize, the country’s staple food, as it is not profitable.

“I am in good health and we had good rains in this area this year, but I still won’t grow more maize if I cannot recover the cost of fertilizer, tractor rental and transport to market,” said small-scale landholder Thulaziswe Simelane, whose family farm lies 20 km south of the central commercial town, Manzini.

HIV/AIDS and a recurring drought have had a negative impact on the agricultural sector: the disease has claimed farm family heads, leaving behind children and the elderly, who cannot cultivate the land.

The effect has been a decline in food production, in a country that was a net exporter of agricultural products 30 years ago.

According to a crop and food supply assessment by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP), the reform of maize pricing was also a factor in Swaziland’s inadequate food production.

The assessment at the end of the 2005 harvest in May noted that 106,000 mt (metric ton) of maize would have to be imported during the 2005/06 marketing year, to feed about 250,000 Swazis currently receiving some form of food assistance–about a quarter of the population – and that maize prices paid to farmers had been slightly lower than last year.

However, at Lilangeni 950 (US $143) per metric tonne, the maize price in Swaziland was nearly double the Lilangeni 550 ($82) it cost across the border in South Africa, according to Ngwane Mills, the country’s largest miller.

The agriculture ministry blamed outmoded techniques for farmers’ inability to make a profit on maize.

But some of Simelane’s complaints were validated last week in a report by the Swaziland Investment Promotion Authority, which found that transportation costs in Swaziland were among the highest in the southern African region.

Milled maize cost Swazi consumers four times the amount that millers paid farmers for their grain.

The National Milling Corporation, a government parastatal, set prices at an amount that reflected the milling, transport and packaging costs of consumer-ready maize-meal, while the ministry of agriculture set the price paid to maize growers.

Higher prices for mealie-meal (milled maize) had prompted some households to turn to rice and other replacement grains, the FAO/WFP study found. In the face of a declining national economy some families had cut back on their total food consumption.

Inadequate food intake would compromise people living with HIV/AIDS, the ministry of health warned.

The FAO/WFP report blamed high local milling costs for the rise in mealie-meal prices. “Milling prices tend to be too high for poor households, which therefore have difficulties accessing adequate supplies,” the report concluded.

Because of Swaziland’s higher maize prices compared to those of foreign suppliers, WFP and other food aid organizations have sourced their maize purchases outside the country.

Simelane’s neighbour, Mfanisibili Dube, was upset to find that it was “impossible” to grow more maize without losing money, leading him to remark, “But we still have all these Swazis who need maize or they will starve – something is not right if we cannot feed our own people.”

At a job summit this week in Manzini, King Mswati III said agriculture was the bedrock of the Swazi economy. “We should concentrate on what we know and can do best as a nation, and that is agriculture. We want to increase our agricultural processing capacity so that we add value to all our commodities.”

The king committed his government to signing trade protocols with foreign markets to give Swazi farmers an outlet for their products.

Prime Minister Themba Dlamini said food self-sufficiency remained the immediate goal. “Swaziland has abundant and rich alluvial soils, and there is great potential to ensure that the country is self-sufficient in food. Food security is key in the survival of any country.”

This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations. IRIN is part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The original s article can be seen at http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=48346&SelectRegion=Southern_Africa&SelectCountry=SWAZILAND

A major UN report has called for an immediate end to Zimbabwe’s slum clearance programme, declaring it to be in violation of international law.