November 24, 2002
A freak combination of severe droughts followed by floods in the last six months has left more than half a million Cambodians short of food for the rest of the year, the United Nations said on Monday.
The tiny Southeast Asian nation, which is still recovering from three decades of civil war, suffered a serious drought in April, followed by floods in August and September, the height of the rainy season. The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said weather patterns in the region were becoming increasingly unpredictable and the lack of adequate irrigation in the deeply impoverished country meant farmers struggled to cope with the growing climatic extremes.
This year, farmers in some provinces had lost two rice planting seasons in a row and 6,500 tonnes of food is now needed over the next five weeks to help 670,000 people in the worst affected districts, the U.N. food aid agency said. ''We need to work intensively on ways to make people less vulnerable to these climatic anomalies,'' WFP country director Rebecca Hansen said.
While this year's food shortages fall well short of the famine that afflicted Cambodia in the late 70s and early 80s, Hansen said climate change could leave certain areas permanently at risk unless more irrigation schemes were built. ''It is vital to build these defences against food shortages. To ignore the threat of climate change is to gamble with people's lives,'' she said in a statement. Cambodian officials have said the country's worst drought in 20 years was due to the El Nino weather phenomenon.
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