The heavily laden truck lurches and groans in low gear over the deeply rutted dirt roads for hour after hour until at last there is temporary respite from the scorching sun and the dust when boys emerge from the undergrowth at a bend in the road offering fresh coconuts.
Heavily protected on account of the continuing civil strife in Somalia, this convoy is on a humanitarian mission, delivering badly needed seeds provided by FAO to villagers whose homes, fields and food stores have been under water for months.
The convoy is led by Mohamoud Mohamoud, FAO's resident agronomist in the Lower Shabelle region, south of Mogadishu, whose main job is to assess the needs of the flood victims. He is accompanied by the Organization's Nairobi-based Emergency Coordinator for Somalia, El-Zein M. El-Muzamil.
Eventually the whole population of Wagade village turns out to welcome the truck. Elders watch in dignified silence as the bags of seed are unloaded. Small children, many with distended stomachs indicating the onset of malnutrition, tumble in the dust.
"This is the first aid we have received," says Hussein Moalim Ahmed, a distinguished, bearded patriarch. "Our fields have been flooded for many months. There is nothing growing there but weeds now. We have no money to hire tractors to clear the land. We have only bananas to eat."
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Aerial view of flooded farmland |
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Seeds being delivered to isolated farming community |
That night in Merca, El-Muzamil receives four elders from the village of Sheikh Banane, several hours inland. They explain that their community lost 1 150 hectares of maize in the flooding caused by the incessant unseasonable rains attributed to El Niño. They are proud men who have never asked for help before, but now they have nothing left: no reserves of food, no money. Even though 750 hectares have dried out and are ready for planting, they are unable to buy seeds. Can FAO help?
El-Muzamil is gravely sympathetic. FAO's ability to provide emergency assistance is limited by the amount the Organization receives from donor countries. He cannot help everyone who needs help. Would the village be interested in FAO setting up a credit scheme to let them buy the seed they need now, paying after the harvest is in? Yes, they would be very interested. The negotiations proceed.
"Other agencies provide immediate food aid and health care. We at FAO concentrate on agricultural rehabilitation," El-Muzamil says. "Getting these farmers back into production is a highly cost-effective means of helping them and making them independent again."
In the Juba river valley the flooding was caused less by rains in the immediate area than downpours hundreds of miles upstream in Ethiopia. The river started rising under clear blue skies. British aid worker Peter Rolfe, working for the Italian organization Terra Nuova, had just arrived to organize repairs to the bridge over the river. "Three days later the bridge was under a metre of water and the river had turned into a raging torrent," he recounts. "I found myself ferrying out food aid by boat."
A flight down the Juba valley reveals the extent of the damage: much of the most productive farmland in the region was the irrigated land along the banks of the river. Great swathes now lie under a metre or more of sand and clay, and new creek beds have been torn through productive fruit farms.
Outside Bardhera and other towns along the Juba, the displaced flood victims huddle in pathetic makeshift shelters - a few bent branches and torn plastic sheeting. Malaria and malnutrition are rife. At a waterhole, herdsmen are watering their camels, using buckets to fill troughs made of skins, since these fastidious animals dislike entering the water even when thirsty. In the shade of a tree a camel lies groaning, watched by its owner. Local veterinary officer Hussein Ismail Ahmad says it is dying.
"After the floods very many animals, particularly camels and goats, died of various diseases, many carried by the swarms of mosquitoes and other biting insects," he says. "We could do nothing. We have no drugs, no medicines."
Aren Mohamed Hussein is tending a group of seven camels with his small son Mohamed. "I used to have 70," he says. "But they died of disease during the floods."
FAO's latest appeal to the international donor community includes a request for more than US$1 million to support veterinary services in Somalia and fight animal diseases. Somalis depend for almost all their foreign currency earnings on livestock exports and it is clear that such help is badly needed.
The story is similar in Buale, further down river. As in Bardhera, FAO is sending in seeds to be distributed by international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in the area: World Vision International in Buale, Terra Nuova in Bardhera. There are cereal seeds arriving in the storehouses, and also vegetable seeds. Some of these are the onions and tomatoes which the villagers are used to growing, but there are also new varieties like cabbage and pumpkin which could help raise nutrition levels, adding variety to their diet and improving their food security.
In Buale village the air is full of the sound of hammering. Local blacksmith Gabow Ali Hurre has just won a contract from FAO to fabricate 3 500 hoes. It is the first paid work he has won since the floods. All his relatives seem to be helping out: men hammering and small boys puffing bellows made from old inner tubes to keep the charcoal fires glowing.
Suddenly there is the sound of a shot. Work stops. Everyone freezes. Then another shot. Finally a voice calls out and everyone relaxes: it was just a militiaman shooting at crocodiles seen near where women draw water from the river; eight have been taken by the reptiles in recent weeks.
The seeds provided by FAO are being used in a particularly poignant context in Merca town. Here there is a residential rehabilitation school funded by the European Union for gunmen who want to make a new start. It is an oasis of calm and order in a chaotic country, with not a gun to be seen. There are literacy and numeracy classes for the young men, 60 percent of whom arrived illiterate after serving for years as militiamen. They are offered a choice of learning farming or fishing skills. Today a class of farming students is taking practical instruction in how to transplant seedlings. Fingers more used to rifles and machine-guns gently separate the delicate plants and settle them in the soil.
Today in Somalia, even if prospects for lasting peace may seem as fragile as these seedlings, the storeroom containing 150 surrendered guns suggests that there is some hope, at least. None of the Merca students has so far dropped out; many voice fierce determination to create a new and different future, even though for the time being, planes and trucks carrying emergency assistance still need heavy protection.
Somalia has a long way to go to become a normal country again.
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