WFP, Nov. 27, 2020
Story by Melissa Marques
Between June and October every year in Mauritania, a largely desert country on Africa’s Atlantic coastline, tens of thousands of people experience a lean season — when food stocks and savings from the previous farming season are depleted before the new harvest has begun. But this year the lean season was longer and harsher as a result of a confluence of terrible events.
Erratic rainfall and dry spells in 2019 affected the mainly rain-fed agricultural system leading to a poor harvest, which resulted in people running out of food supplies earlier than usual in 2020 — an early onset of the lean season. This coincided with the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic. With the country’s authorities taking bold and swift measures — including closure of markets, restrictions of movements — to contain the spread of the disease, some of the most vulnerable people were left in a bind.
“It was difficult,” says El Bou Menne, the chief of the village of Limragha in Assaba region in the South of the country. “We had no more money, we were also cut off from supplies from the big cities for supplies. I have a family of 20 people to feed, so just imagine!”
In full: https://insight.wfp.org/how-climate-and-coronavirus-forced-people-into-debt-and-hunger-1c3c57d8e790
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