In dry Lesotho, hunger stalks family farmersBy Zama LUTHULI August 14, 2024

Daniel Phoofolo (55), a subsistence farmer, walks through his vegetable garden with dried crops in Butha-Buthe district on August 7, 2024. (Phill Magakoe / AFP).

By AFP - Agence France Presse

In dry Lesotho, hunger stalks family farmers

By Zama LUTHULI

Butha-Buthe, Lesotho (AFP) August 14, 2024

In a parched village in the small mountain kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa, a farmer walks through his dusty plot and pulls desiccated stalks and roots from the dry earth.

In the past, the land fed Daniel Phoofolo's family with enough produce to sell.

But a drought that has been hitting southern African countries for months has left it barren and bare.

Phoofolo's wife went to neighboring South Africa to find a job. He and his two young daughters have been reduced to just two meals a day: bread and tea for breakfast, and milk and cornmeal porridge for dinner.

Wearing a torn jacket and rubber boots, the 55-year-old subsistence farmer is visibly anxious. Beyond him are fields of wilted corn withering into a dry, brown landscape.

The family, near the border town of Butha-Buthe in the northwest of the country, is among the 700,000 people who, according to the government, are struggling with hunger in Lesotho, which in July declared a national disaster due to low crop yields and the threat to food availability.

Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have also declared disasters, as the most severe El Niño induced drought in a century burns crops and kills livestock across the region.

“I planted a row of potatoes, but they're not growing because there's no rain,” Phoofolo told AFP.

Lesotho is a poor country. Almost a quarter of its two million inhabitants are jobless and half live below the poverty line, according to the Ministry of Development Planning.

Around 80% depend on subsistence farming, according to the World Food Program (WFP).

For many farmers in Butha-Buthe, this year is the first in which their crops have failed, district councilor Tshepo Makara told AFP.

“In Lesotho, we survive on agriculture, and the harvest was not good,” he said.

“This resulted in a large number of people being affected and that's why the government had to intervene.”

- 'No rain'.

A temporary employment scheme pays local Basotho people 500 loti (US$27, 25 euros) for two weeks' work, such as road maintenance and cemetery cleaning, Makara said.

Among the participants is 59-year-old Arabang Polanka, a skinny widower with four children who works on a road project.

Only a few small cabbages survive on his dusty plot, where beet, spinach, and onions once grew.

Polanka's children now go to school without breakfast. He is worried that they will soon have to go to bed without dinner.

“It's dry and there's no rain,” said the frustrated farmer.

Near his home in the village of Lipelaneng, a group of women wash clothes in a small pool at the end of a dry river, while a child leads a donkey in search of water.

Faced with the scenario of thousands of people going hungry, Prime Minister Sam Matekane appealed for help and allocated two million loti to assist vulnerable families.

The WFP expects the situation to worsen as the drought continues.

At least 27 million people have been affected in southern Africa, where many depend on agriculture, said acting regional director Lola Castro in an interview with AFP.

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The failure of their crops also wipes out a source of money for Lesotho's subsistence farmers. There has been an increase in stock theft, as people can barely afford to buy meat, said Makara.

While the authorities are urging farmers to turn to drought-resistant crops such as sorghum, some in this part of Lesotho are pooling their scarce resources and labor in village gardens, from which they can share the produce.

Phoofolo, also looking for solutions, is planning to dig a small dam in case the rains fail again.

The drought “bothers me a lot”, he said. “I end up not being able to sleep at night.”

zam/br/kjm