Food Prospects Improve in Tanzania

NAIROBI - Jul 2/02 - IRIN -- Tanzania's food prospects for this year appear to be favorable, despite earlier concerns that increased maize exports to neighboring countries to the south would trigger a severe food shortage crisis, humanitarian sources said.

Selma Kalousek of the World Food Program told IRIN on Monday that the food security outlook for Tanzania for 2002/03 was "better than it has been in the past two to three years".

A combination of a series of good harvests and stocks held by farmers and traders, as well as those in the government's Strategic Grain Reserve, along with adequate supplies of water and forage, had significantly improved the country's food security outlook, USAID's Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) said in its latest report.

However, it warned that isolated regions in northern Tanzania could be susceptible to a food shortage because of the unfavorable performance of the short and the long rains season in the 2001/02 production year.

"The extent of vulnerability to food insecurity in these and other places will be determined after the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, the Food Security Information Team and other partners complete a nationwide crop and food supply assessment in July," Kalousek said.

Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2002

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