Six months on, Cyclone Idai still has a grip on Mozambique

Beira, six months after cyclone Idai hit the city in central Mozambique. Photo: Gioia Forster/dpa

The damage caused by Cyclone Idai in Mozambique endures. Hundreds of farmers lost their harvests; schools and homes were torn apart. Now, with the coming harvest also under threat, a food crisis looms.

Beira, Mozambique (dpa) - Nature has twice ravaged the life of Joao Deluis.

First, he and his family had to leave their home after it became flooded. They were relocated to a piece of land on the edge of Beira, a large city on the coast of Mozambique.

There, on soil dry as bone, they and a few dozen other families began rebuilding their lives. Then came Cyclone Idai.

"When the cyclone came, it destroyed all the work we did, everything," 31-year-old Deluis recalls six months after the natural disaster.

Deluis, his wife and two children are living in a tent. Their personal belongings fill the small space; with the sun blazing, it is hot and humid under the plastic canvas.

But the worst thing about the cyclone was the loss of the crops that fed the family. Idai made landfall in the night to March 15 - shortly before the harvest.

"We lost everything," Deluis says with a sigh.

Tens of thousands of others suffered the same fate. Around 3 million people were affected by the cyclone in the southern African countries of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi; more than 600 people died.

Shortly after, a second cyclone called Kenneth also struck the north of Mozambique. The consequences are still noticeable today.

Most of those affected were small-scale farmers who were hit hard by the loss of their crops. Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), an initiative of the United Nations and several other organizations, estimates that some 1.6 million people in Mozambique struggled to access enough food between April and September.

This includes not just those affected by Cyclone Idai in the centre of the country, but also people hit by drought in the south and Cyclone Kenneth in the north.

Idai also destroyed the seeds for the next harvest. As a result, the situation could soon become even more dramatic: between October and February, the number of people going hungry could rise to 1.9 million, according to IPC.

A food crisis cannot be ruled out, says Angel Vazquez of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Signs of Idai's destruction can still be found around Beira, which is home to 500,000 people. Toppled trees lie on the white beaches, their roots sticking out into the air like tentacles.

In a school in Dondo, a town outside Beira, children are still taking lessons in tents because the harsh midday sun streams into their classrooms through the torn-open roof. The school's latrines lie in ruins; the humanitarian organization CARE is helping to build new ones.

For some, the wind was the worst aspect of Idai. It toppled trees and blew the roofs off houses - often tin roofs that for most people are too expensive to replace. For others, it was the rain, which pelted them unrelentingly for days and melted away huts made out of straw and mud. 

For Luisa Jose, it was the salt water that washed up from the sea. It flooded her field and smothered the rice planted there.

"All the plants died," the 70-year-old says with a frown.

Jose and other women who have gathered at a community centre in their Beira neighbourhood explain that the water also destroyed their seed stocks.  

"We don't have anything to plant," says Helena Augusto as she holds her three-week-old baby.

Some people are hoping for a small harvest in September and October. Aid workers fanned out after the cyclone to distribute seeds to affected farmers, so that they could quickly plant something before the dry season.

"It was a race not only against time, but against all odds," the ICRC's Vazquez recalls.

Some areas were completely flooded and accessible only by boat or helicopter; others were buried under metres of mud.

The ICRC distributed maize, bean and sorghum seeds and sweet potato vines to around 21,000 families, Vazquez says.

"If this harvest fails, we have a population that is facing food insecurity," he says.

Some farmers managed to get back on their feet by themselves.

Charles Grimo planted lettuce and cabbage in addition to rice. The vegetables grow faster than rice, maize or sweet potatoes, says the 44-year-old, whose crops were all destroyed by the cyclone. And the vegetables can also grow during the dry season with a bit of water from a well, he says.

But many others are still struggling.

"Fifty per cent of the inhabitants of Beira district are still affected in one way or another," says Bonissa Sitole, who is in charge of agriculture in the district.

The situation is similar in other affected regions.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has already begun to distribute seeds and farming tools to 11,000 families for the next harvest.

Together with other organizations, CARE also plans to soon provide thousands of families with seeds.

But the first real ray of hope is still far away - the next large harvest is not due until early next year.

Published by the German Press Agency (dpa).