Transport, landmines hamper Angola farm recovery
Thu 15 Sep 2005
By Peter Apps
CASSOMA, Angola, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Destroyed or impassable roads and railways are crippling attempts to help Angola's war-shattered farm sector recover, while landmines are also restricting growth and endangering unwary farmers, experts say.
In the southeastern province of Cuando Cubango, there are so many landmines that elephants have abandoned their ancestral routes north from Botswana and Namibia.
Before a nationalist war against Portuguese rule and 27 years of civil war that followed independence in 1975, fertile Angola was one of Africa's success stories. Now food shortages are rife and some 50 percent of children are malnourished.
"We don't see a future," 25-year-old Abilo Chitamba told Reuters in Cassoma village in Angola's central Huambo province, once the breadbasket of the country. "We live for each day. Our main issue is feeding ourselves and each other."
Like many others, Chitamba fled his family's land when fighting between UNITA rebels and government forces made life in the village too dangerous. Many refugees had lost valuable agricultural skills when they returned after a 2002 peace deal.
Before the war Angola was one of Africa's largest coffee producers, but current production of 5,000 tonnes a year is just a fraction of what it once was.
Two thirds of that never makes it to market. Battle damage and neglect have pushed up road transport costs to levels that make shipping the coffee from surviving growers in the northern province of Uige simply too expensive to be worth the trip.
Production of both coffee and foodstuffs such as maize and cassava is recovering but aid workers say lack of good roads or railways means there is little incentive for subsistence farmers to shift into cash crops they will be unable to get to market.
In Angola, chickens are transported by air because it would take too long, cost too much and too many would die if they went by road. It makes commercial agriculture all but impossible.
"It's access to markets," said Jerry Bailey, the United Nations World Food Programme's representative in Huambo, which saw some of the worst fighting in the final stages of the war.
"People aren't going to grow a surplus if they can't get it to market."
Improvements are slowly taking place. Chitamba's village is now connected to the nearest towns and to Huambo city itself by a road built by local people under a food-for-work scheme run by WFP. But international aid funding for Angola is drying up so such projects are increasingly rare.
DANGER ON UNUSED GROUND
More significant are government schemes - many backed by a $2 billion loan from China secured against Angola's massive oil revenues - aimed at boosting industry and farming through rebuilding the transport network.
But projects such as the rehabilitation of the road to the main coffee centre around Uige and the Benguela railway linking Huambo to ports on the South Atlantic, remain stuck in their in their early stages.
Large parts of Angola remain almost completely inaccessible to aid workers or many government officials -- the roads either mined, washed away or never built. Aid agencies say they know there are many people in desperate need who they can currently neither see nor reach.
Landmines also impinge on agricultural production. In most areas, people know where the minefields are and avoid them, but their presence can still prevent new land being put into use.
Most at risk from mines are tens of thousands of refugees returning from camps in Angola's neighbours, desperate for food and land but unaware of the risks of using untilled ground.
"Very often, local people will be farming right up to the edge of where the mines are," said Helen Gray, project officer for demining group the Halo Trust. "The problem comes when people come back and you get more pressure on the land."
© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.