(Bloomberg) -- The United Nations’ World Food Programme is seeking 290,000 tons of corn from as far afield as Mexico and Ukraine as its mounts its biggest ever drought response in Southern Africa after the El Nino weather phenomenon scorched crops across the region.
With Zimbabwe’s staple corn crop having plunged about 70% and those in Zambia and Malawi also decimated, the WFP is trying to raise about $400 million to fund its response. While it would usually rely on South Africa for corn supplies, normally the continent’s biggest exporter, that country’s crop also fell by about a fifth, limiting the amount of grain available for export.
Assisting Southern Africa is difficult because residents of the region primarily eat white corn rather than the yellow variety that’s popular elsewhere and many countries ban the import of genetically modified grain unless it’s milled. Still, about 27 million people across seven countries will need assistance from later this year until March 2025, said Valerie Guarnieri, assistant executive director for programme and policy development at the WFP.
“We definitely are having to go beyond the region in order to procure the white maize that we’re seeking for our response,” she said in an interview on Aug. 2 in Bloomberg’s Johannesburg office after returning from a trip to Zimbabwe. “We are expecting to be importing from as far as Mexico for this response.”
The WFP has some tenders for the supply of white corn from Mexico, one of the few other countries that grows substantial quantities of the variety, and expects to buy about 100,000 tons from the country. It also aims to seek the same quantity from Tanzania, which has had a bumper crop this season, and “small amounts of milled yellow maize from Ukraine.”
While the region has received donations of corn from countries such as the US in previous droughts, Guarnieri said this is the first time she can recall the organization seeking to bring in grain from Mexico in commercial transactions.
The WFP will only be meeting a portion of the region’s demand although it will also be using its expertize to help countries procure corn. What is available from South Africa may be bought by the governments of neighboring countries, Guarnieri said. In the marketing season beginning April 27, South Africa exported almost 346,000 tons of white corn to nearby countries, with more than half of that going to Zimbabwe It also exported 179,000 tons of yellow corn, with 54% of that being bought by Zimbabwe, according to the South African Grain Information Service.
Millers in Zimbabwe have said they will need to import about 1.4 million tons of corn and are making inquiries in Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and the US. Botswana has said its seeking imports from Brazil, while Zambia is seeking 650,000 tons from Tanzania.
Guarnieri said the WFP will start providing support in the so-called lean season, when local harvests have run out, as early as October this year compared to between January and March in previous responses. The early start is due to the severity of this year’s drought.
Heavy debt burdens and economic upheaval in some countries in the region has also limited the nations’ ability to respond, she said.
“They’re approaching this historic drought in a difficult fiscal space,” Guarnieri said.
The drought, the worst in 40 years in some countries, has been exacerbated by climate change, said Reena Ghelani, assistant secretary-general at the United Nations, in a separate interview in Zimbabwe.
“This region has seen drought once every decade or longer, we are seeing more droughts because of the climate situation and some scientists say we are going to see more frequent droughts,” said Ghelani, who is also the climate crisis coordinator for the El Nino/La Nina response at the the UN.
The 16-nation Southern African Development Community issued an appeal for $5.5 billion in humanitarian assistance in May.
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--With assistance from Matthew Hill and Ray Ndlovu.
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