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News/Event Item
Crops Cold Comfort For Hungry Refugees
3 February 2005
By Peter Apps
Africa's farmers have produced more than expected despite locust plagues and drought, but that is cold comfort to the continent's countless refugees with no cash to pay, or aid agencies whose funding has dried up.
...The WFP says it saw donations for Africa vanish almost completely in January, after the tsunami that devastated the Indian Ocean region, forcing it to cut back on how much food it buys -- bad news for producers with surplus stock to shift.
...Roughly 900,000 Liberians -- mainly refugees returning to their villages following the end of a 14-year civil war in 2003 -- rely on WFP handouts. The agency had intended to buy some 200,000 tonnes of food in 2005 for them and for refugees in neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone.
In nearby Mauritania, the agency says it will need 187,000 tonnes of food to cope with consequences of drought and locust swarms, but fears the insects might have destroyed most of the crops in neighbouring countries were largely unfounded.
Copyright 2005 Reuters News Service
For the Full Article, go to:
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29349/story.htm
World Food Program (WFP)
http://www.wfp.org/
category: News from Other Sources : General Health News
contributed by Andrea Welch on 3 February 2005
Africa :
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