Give Us food Mr. President!
- Category: Peering Eye
- Date 22-01-2006
- 546 views
We do not merely eat to live; we also live to eat! We cannot live if we have nothing eat: food was created for the stomach as the stomach was created for food. During my secondary school days, we loathed so much to go hungry, and were always excited whenever we had chance for special meals, in the sense of meat on the menu.
Having such a nice repast would be an occasion for pure ravenousness and gluttony. We would gobble down hilly platefuls of the prepared victuals; you might think that many pupils’ overstuffed stomachs would explode to fritter away the special meal we had enjoyed immensely. No stomach ever burst open, some of the former voracious students’ stomachs have since swollen from both good quality meals and wealth accumulation; today they resemble pregnant women.
At the time, we invented our own motto, that: “I would rather eat to death than live to starve”! That was to suggest that it is less excruciating to die of overeating than of starvation. For those who have ever experienced biting hunger even for a single day could dread how painful it would be if the horror of starvation were to persist for days. It must be a most agonising death to undergo!
I believe now that I was never wrong to abhor hunger so much. And if I was the President of a United Republic … such as this one, I believe I would have collapsed while delivering my 2006 New Years Message. Yes, I confess, you would have seen me quiver and tremble, because of my knowledge and fear of hunger.
Look here: Tanzania’s domestic cereal availability in the 2005/06 marketing year of June-May is estimated at 5.1 million tonnes against total utilisation of 5.6 million tonnes – therefore, Tanzania needs urgent food aid.
In his first ever New Year’s Message, Tanzania President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete described the food situation as precarious and urged Tanzanians to use the available food wisely.
He sounded a warning on the food situation saying, “because of the drought, we expect poor harvest in the short rains season which accounts for thirty percent of our annual food stock.” (See: “East Africans among 12m people in need of food aid”, The East African January 9-15, 2006, page 7).
It is considered that about thirty-five districts in Tanzania have been hit by food shortages. The government had said that 613,000 people would need 21,500 tonnes of food aid between November 2005 and February 2006.
While arguing that the poor rains could aggravate the food situation, Mr. Kikwete reportedly emphasised that “The rains have not been sufficient to meet our agricultural requirements. Rains in areas which normally receive adequate rains starting in October came late, and when they did come, they were below normal.”
Well, starvation is here but unfortunately, it mostly afflicts blameless citizens; the Ordinary Tanzanians who labour a great deal to sustain the country’s food produce. Regrettably, they are powerless growers and more so the most luckless whenever food shortages befall a country. The most assiduous labourers bear the lumber of both natural perils and manmade upheavals such as drought, floods, landslides, wars, soil exhaustion and erosion, economic adversity, political flux, corruption, general misrule and etcetera.
Town dwellers like your columnist and government officials do very little in the agriculture sector. We write about it so much in newspapers and novels (I am doing now), read about in the media (you are doing now) and debate about it in workshops and conferences in posh hotels around town.
We do not engage directly in production of food for household use but whenever there is any form of food cataclysm, we, the townsfolk, will naturally suffer less. With a new government that came to power promising wealth, health and security for us all, let us start with food security, Mr. President!
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen