I mentioned Sudan in yesterday’s posting. I was there in early 1994, shortly before the genocide in Rwanda erupted. When I had arrived in Africa, I was aware conflict had been raging in Sudan for years. I wondered why no one seemed to pay 
attention or care. On this trip I filed several reports. A colleague in Washington pulled together several into a single documentary-style production:
Sudan must seem to many a place that fortune has overlooked. The southern region of Africa’s largest nation is being laid waste by the continent's longest war and a capricious nature that destroys crops just as they're ready to be harvested. In recent days, the oppressive misery has taken on a new dimension as the government in Khartoum unleashes an offensive against rebels in the south, sending more thousands across the borders, seeking shelter. Alex Belida recently spent five days in southern Sudan, where foreign correspondents are infrequently seen. He says efforts have been unsuccessful to work out a ceasefire and open new relief corridors between the Islamic government in Khartoum and the rebel movements of the largely Christian and animist south. As correspondent Belida reports, Sudan’s song is one of sorrow:
The young boy, blind in one eye, stands in the shade of a sparsely-stocked market stall in the southern Sudanese village of Milo. His song is about the famine and the fighting ravaging the dry grasslands stretching for hundreds of kilometers around him in remote northern Bahr-el-Ghazal province.
Of the two, famine is now the larger threat. Tens of thousands of people live in this drought-tormented landscape where daytime temperatures hover around 45 degrees Celsius. Many are so desperately hungry that they look for a certain kind of black ant known to collect grass seeds in its underground nest. Some people are digging up those nests to take, then eat, the seeds.
On the horizon, columns of black smoke can be seen. Officials of the rebel Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army and its affiliated humanitarian organization, the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association, say the smoke is not evidence of fighting. The people, they say, are setting fires to drive wild animals out of the thorny underbrush to capture, kill and eat.
“In my area, people are living randomly now like animals, because their houses were burned, their cattle were taken and even children are being taken also."
Paul Malong Awan is the commander of a nearby rebel-controlled district, one that has seen heavy fighting within recent weeks as government troops backed by Arab militia or mujahedin swept south along the railway line to Wau, a major garrison town. One of his hands and one of his arms are bandaged -- the result of gunshot wounds he says he received in battle.
He and other commanders believe the government will eventually try to dislodge the rebels and the people around Milo and other nearby villages in what is the rebel's northernmost enclave. But he remains defiant.
"There is not something that can make me surrender to my enemy. ... I will fight until my last day . . . our children can also grow to fight the common enemy."
In the meantime, though, shortages of water, a lack of food and rampant disease are taking a heavy toll among the people of this region. The next planting season is still some two months away and the next harvest will not come until September, if it comes at all.
Doctor Bellario Ahoy Ngong, a surgeon and the rebels' health coordinator in this part of Bahr-el-Ghazal province, says the situation is precarious.
“The people ... the little they cultivate from farms is now going almost out of stock, and they depend on the leaves of the trees and the seeds of grass as you have seen. Some, they go to the river and get some fish, which is not enough this year so they are barely living on these things. But in the two months to come, they will have nothing, and the situation will be more precarious.”
The market in Milo gives testimony to the shortages. Aside from one stand with a few onions, another where people can buy groundnuts (peanuts), and an area where some goats and chickens are sold, there is little food available. Foreign relief organizations are trying to help, but they only have the resources to target the most vulnerable groups -- the children, pregnant women, the sick and the elderly.
Some foreign experts say this part of south Sudan has traditionally experienced lean times at this time of year. They describe the situation as difficult but not entirely hopeless.
Some suggest that efforts to promote irrigation and greater crop variety could ease the area's need for foreign assistance. But that is some time in the future and Paul Enright, the local representative of the United Nations' World Food Program, acknowledges that this year much will depend on whether seeds and farm tools reach Bahr el- Ghazal in time through the fragile airlift organized by relief agencies.
"It may struggle through if the seeds come in time and are issued [out], then it is possible it will prevent the famine from happening. If there is a problem with the seeds, or whatever, and they do not get through on time, then with the drought last year, then there could be a serious problem up until the next harvest, which will be in 1995."
And by then, countless more will have died -- adding their numbers to the estimated one million who have already perished in southern Sudan.
Relief agencies say a million and-a-half people are at risk of starvation unless significant help soon arrives. US aid officials say nearly a million people are completely dependent on humanitarian aid. Such figures are almost beyond human comprehension, but as correspondent Belida found in his travels in southern Sudan, tragedy has an all-too-human face:
Kon Garang Kon is about eleven years old. He has no family, no clothes, no food, nothing. He stands in the broiling midday Sudanese sun, his thin, naked body coated with a fine layer of white dust. As vultures circle overhead, he tells his story.
Kon says he left his home in a village some 50 kilometers away after his father and mother, brothers and sisters all died of hunger. He traveled here to Akon, a village in Sudan's Bahr el-Ghazal province, because he heard he could get food.
But aside from some grass seeds scrounged from the bush or given to him by other displaced people living nearby, Kon has nothing to eat. When the sun sets, he huddles alone beneath a tree, defenseless against the chill of the night.
Wol Wol Wol [eds: correct] is an elderly man wearing tattered, dirt-stained clothing. He calls himself chief of the primitive bush camp where Kon and some 50 other southern Sudanese fleeing famine and fighting now live.
He says the adults as well as the children among the group are very tired, very weak. Mr. Wol Wol believes they will all be dead within seven to 14 days unless they get help. It is a prediction which the few relief workers active in the Akon area do not challenge.
"What shall I do?" he asks some visitors. He extends his hand in a plea for assistance. He says if they have nothing, then maybe when they leave, the visitors can take his people with them.
The chief, Kon and the others are just a few of the tens of thousands whose lives are hanging in the balance these days in Bahr el-Ghazal province. It is regarded by relief workers as the most remote area of southern Sudan. There is virtually no road access to the region. The only relief supplies that arrive come by plane.
But that air bridge, operated out of Kenya by a UN organization known as "Operation Lifeline Sudan," is a very fragile lifeline. There are few aircraft available and those in service are subject to breakdowns and other flight delays. The planes must also have landing permission from the Khartoum government -- even though it does not control the rebel-held territory around Akon.
But perhaps more significantly, the operation is extremely costly -- far more costly than overland relief efforts -- and aid workers say it is no secret that donations for the air bridge have fallen short of the projected need. Doctor Bellario Ahoy Ngong is a surgeon and Akon area health coordinator for the rebel-affiliated Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Organization.
"If nothing is done within the coming two months, then there will be mass starvation -- and especially northern Bahr el-Ghazal is vulnerable, because it is far away from relief centers in Loki (Kenyan supply storage base). So, you cannot even think of road transport of food to this area; it is only dependent on planes, and since donors are not willing to pay for the transport of planes, then there will be a general disaster in this area."
Even now, the team of foreign specialists from the French group "Doctors Without Borders," who operate a feeding center in Akon, say their stocks are running precariously low. If a plane does not come within the next few days, they say, the situation will be catastrophic.
But the feeding center is only taking care of small children and other categories of people regarded as the most vulnerable and most needy. That is about two thousand of the six thousand people estimated to live in the immediate vicinity of Akon. No one can say how many more, like young Kon and Mr. Wol Wol, are struggling for survival in the parched countryside -- their presence uncounted, their plight all too real.
The vagaries of nature are made even worse by the fighting in the area, as the government unleashes its latest offensive against the rebels. The Clinton administration estimates the fighting has caused the displacement of 200-thousand people. In the south, near the border with Uganda, terror comes from the sky as government planes fly overhead and drop their bombs. Farther north, terror comes on horseback as Arab militia, described by rebels and relief workers, cut a swath of destruction through the countryside. A woman in southern Sudan tells correspondent Belida her experience:
Awut Buth is about 45 years old. But she looks far older as she speaks to some visitors along a dirt path outside Akon, a small rebel-held village in south Sudan’s remote Bahr el-Ghazal province. She fled here with several other members of her family after Arab militia swept through her hometown some 40 kilometers away -- killing, looting, raping, and kidnapping, she says.
Looking haggard and weary, wearing just a tattered skirt, she says these Islamic warriors, or mujahedin, killed her husband and one of her children. She says another three children were captured and taken away.
She does not know what has happened to them. But rebel officials, relief workers and human rights organizations say it is quite probable they will become slaves in the north.
Bona Baang Dhol is the senior commander of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army in northern Bahr el-Ghazal. He says several hundred children have been kidnapped by the militia in recent weeks.
"These people ... they convert them to be Muslims. If you are a Christian, you are told to change your name. For example, you are called Joseph, you are now called 'Yusuf' and you will no longer be called Joseph.”
According to the commander and foreign relief workers, about ten-thousand to eleven-thousand regular troops and mujahedin recently passed through this area along the railway line that runs to Wau, one of the Khartoum government's strongholds in the south. It is thought these are some of the forces being used in the current government offensive farther south, along Sudan’s border with Uganda -- an offensive regarded as the biggest yet in the more than decade old civil war.
Commander Baang Dhol says there is little military activity now along the northern front. But he is bracing for more trouble, possibly including bombing attacks by government aircraft. Relief workers in the Akon area have already built a bomb shelter.
Still, the commander appears untroubled. He insists the government cannot win the war. It may take control of all the major cities and towns, but he says Khartoum can never control all of the countryside.
"A guerrilla cannot be finished [defeated]. If you go to the river now and fish, I think you will not finish (catch) all the fish in the river. The same thing (is true) for the guerrilla..."
The latest fighting, and the resulting displacement of tens of thousand of southern Sudanese, comes at a critical time, though. The planting season is drawing near -- yet people are already short of food, a problem accentuated by the worst drought in years, along with pest infestations and shortages of tools and seeds.
The few foreign relief workers in the Akon area are trying to do what they can to alleviate the suffering, treating the sick and combat-injured, handing out food to children and others in the gravest danger of starvation.
They are also trying to dig new wells, to ease a growing water supply problem as local rivers begin to dry up.
But between the fighting and the famine, one Sudanese man says, the people are suffering a lot.
Those displaced, many of them very young, roaming the region and then escaping into neighboring nations, sometimes numbering in the thousands, form a new and melancholy children's crusade. One of them said, "we think God is punishing us."
Meanwhile, back home, familiar songs are being sung in their absence as a quiet night descends on a southern village. But as correspondent Belida concludes in this report, that serenity is deceptive:
By night, under moonlight that silhouettes the reed huts and palm trees, the sounds of singing children suggest that all is well in this southern Sudanese village.
But the image is a deceptive one. for here in Akon, in rebel-held territory in Sudan’s Bahr el-Ghazal province, hunger and disease are widespread and they are claiming lives daily -- far more lives than the fighting that flares from time to time nearby.
Nyon Kwach was about 45 years old when he died this morning -- from hunger, a local relief worker says.
His wife is out hunting for something to eat and still has not returned. She does not yet know her husband is dead. The man's brother digs his grave, hacking away at the hard-packed earth with a crude spade as the unrelenting tropical sun beats down. One of the dead man's sons relieves him while he talks with visitors.
The brother, Nyon Akech, says it is not the first time death has struck the family since its members fled to Akon to escape nearby fighting and to find food. Three children have already died of hunger.
Just several hundred meters away from the gravesite is a feeding center run by the French group "Doctors Without Borders." There, aid workers are trying to save the lives of other children.
These children, most of them too weak or too sick to lift their heads, sit with their mothers, waiting for milk and medicine.
Arwal Majok is one of those mothers. She says she came on foot from a village 12 hours away from Akon with three children, one of whom died along the way.
Her husband has gone to Khartoum, she says, to look for food. She says she left their home after it was burned down during a recent government offensive against rebel-held areas.
Only her baby is getting assistance. She says she and her other surviving child receive nothing unless they take some of the baby's ration.
The relief workers say that is part of what they describe as a vicious circle. They feed the weakest and most vulnerable, discharging them after their bodies have regained weight and strength. But once they leave, the patients are likely to once again encounter the same food shortage problems that got them into the center in the first place.
They will again weaken. In Akon, there are as yet few of the living skeletons that are the most vivid reminders of past African famines. But Veronique Priem, leader of the "Doctors Without Borders" team in the village, says that could change rapidly.
“For the moment, you will not be shocked when you go around. It’s a normal village with a normal life and people. You are not shocked by the situation. But when you know, especially, we are in February and the next harvest will be in September and you know the people have nothing . . . what can they do?"
The planting season is coming. But at the moment, aid workers like Ms. Priem fear most of the population may be too weak to work the fields unless more food arrives. They say that right now, if aircraft arrive with seeds for cultivation, the people are likely to eat them. At the same time, though, they say that unless the planting is done, there will be no harvest later in the year and the vicious circle of aid dependency will continue and widen.
attention or care. On this trip I filed several reports. A colleague in Washington pulled together several into a single documentary-style production:Sudan must seem to many a place that fortune has overlooked. The southern region of Africa’s largest nation is being laid waste by the continent's longest war and a capricious nature that destroys crops just as they're ready to be harvested. In recent days, the oppressive misery has taken on a new dimension as the government in Khartoum unleashes an offensive against rebels in the south, sending more thousands across the borders, seeking shelter. Alex Belida recently spent five days in southern Sudan, where foreign correspondents are infrequently seen. He says efforts have been unsuccessful to work out a ceasefire and open new relief corridors between the Islamic government in Khartoum and the rebel movements of the largely Christian and animist south. As correspondent Belida reports, Sudan’s song is one of sorrow:
The young boy, blind in one eye, stands in the shade of a sparsely-stocked market stall in the southern Sudanese village of Milo. His song is about the famine and the fighting ravaging the dry grasslands stretching for hundreds of kilometers around him in remote northern Bahr-el-Ghazal province.
Of the two, famine is now the larger threat. Tens of thousands of people live in this drought-tormented landscape where daytime temperatures hover around 45 degrees Celsius. Many are so desperately hungry that they look for a certain kind of black ant known to collect grass seeds in its underground nest. Some people are digging up those nests to take, then eat, the seeds.
On the horizon, columns of black smoke can be seen. Officials of the rebel Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army and its affiliated humanitarian organization, the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association, say the smoke is not evidence of fighting. The people, they say, are setting fires to drive wild animals out of the thorny underbrush to capture, kill and eat.
“In my area, people are living randomly now like animals, because their houses were burned, their cattle were taken and even children are being taken also."
Paul Malong Awan is the commander of a nearby rebel-controlled district, one that has seen heavy fighting within recent weeks as government troops backed by Arab militia or mujahedin swept south along the railway line to Wau, a major garrison town. One of his hands and one of his arms are bandaged -- the result of gunshot wounds he says he received in battle.
He and other commanders believe the government will eventually try to dislodge the rebels and the people around Milo and other nearby villages in what is the rebel's northernmost enclave. But he remains defiant.
"There is not something that can make me surrender to my enemy. ... I will fight until my last day . . . our children can also grow to fight the common enemy."
In the meantime, though, shortages of water, a lack of food and rampant disease are taking a heavy toll among the people of this region. The next planting season is still some two months away and the next harvest will not come until September, if it comes at all.
Doctor Bellario Ahoy Ngong, a surgeon and the rebels' health coordinator in this part of Bahr-el-Ghazal province, says the situation is precarious.
“The people ... the little they cultivate from farms is now going almost out of stock, and they depend on the leaves of the trees and the seeds of grass as you have seen. Some, they go to the river and get some fish, which is not enough this year so they are barely living on these things. But in the two months to come, they will have nothing, and the situation will be more precarious.”
The market in Milo gives testimony to the shortages. Aside from one stand with a few onions, another where people can buy groundnuts (peanuts), and an area where some goats and chickens are sold, there is little food available. Foreign relief organizations are trying to help, but they only have the resources to target the most vulnerable groups -- the children, pregnant women, the sick and the elderly.
Some foreign experts say this part of south Sudan has traditionally experienced lean times at this time of year. They describe the situation as difficult but not entirely hopeless.
Some suggest that efforts to promote irrigation and greater crop variety could ease the area's need for foreign assistance. But that is some time in the future and Paul Enright, the local representative of the United Nations' World Food Program, acknowledges that this year much will depend on whether seeds and farm tools reach Bahr el- Ghazal in time through the fragile airlift organized by relief agencies.
"It may struggle through if the seeds come in time and are issued [out], then it is possible it will prevent the famine from happening. If there is a problem with the seeds, or whatever, and they do not get through on time, then with the drought last year, then there could be a serious problem up until the next harvest, which will be in 1995."
And by then, countless more will have died -- adding their numbers to the estimated one million who have already perished in southern Sudan.
Relief agencies say a million and-a-half people are at risk of starvation unless significant help soon arrives. US aid officials say nearly a million people are completely dependent on humanitarian aid. Such figures are almost beyond human comprehension, but as correspondent Belida found in his travels in southern Sudan, tragedy has an all-too-human face:
Kon Garang Kon is about eleven years old. He has no family, no clothes, no food, nothing. He stands in the broiling midday Sudanese sun, his thin, naked body coated with a fine layer of white dust. As vultures circle overhead, he tells his story.
Kon says he left his home in a village some 50 kilometers away after his father and mother, brothers and sisters all died of hunger. He traveled here to Akon, a village in Sudan's Bahr el-Ghazal province, because he heard he could get food.
But aside from some grass seeds scrounged from the bush or given to him by other displaced people living nearby, Kon has nothing to eat. When the sun sets, he huddles alone beneath a tree, defenseless against the chill of the night.
Wol Wol Wol [eds: correct] is an elderly man wearing tattered, dirt-stained clothing. He calls himself chief of the primitive bush camp where Kon and some 50 other southern Sudanese fleeing famine and fighting now live.
He says the adults as well as the children among the group are very tired, very weak. Mr. Wol Wol believes they will all be dead within seven to 14 days unless they get help. It is a prediction which the few relief workers active in the Akon area do not challenge.
"What shall I do?" he asks some visitors. He extends his hand in a plea for assistance. He says if they have nothing, then maybe when they leave, the visitors can take his people with them.
The chief, Kon and the others are just a few of the tens of thousands whose lives are hanging in the balance these days in Bahr el-Ghazal province. It is regarded by relief workers as the most remote area of southern Sudan. There is virtually no road access to the region. The only relief supplies that arrive come by plane.
But that air bridge, operated out of Kenya by a UN organization known as "Operation Lifeline Sudan," is a very fragile lifeline. There are few aircraft available and those in service are subject to breakdowns and other flight delays. The planes must also have landing permission from the Khartoum government -- even though it does not control the rebel-held territory around Akon.
But perhaps more significantly, the operation is extremely costly -- far more costly than overland relief efforts -- and aid workers say it is no secret that donations for the air bridge have fallen short of the projected need. Doctor Bellario Ahoy Ngong is a surgeon and Akon area health coordinator for the rebel-affiliated Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Organization.
"If nothing is done within the coming two months, then there will be mass starvation -- and especially northern Bahr el-Ghazal is vulnerable, because it is far away from relief centers in Loki (Kenyan supply storage base). So, you cannot even think of road transport of food to this area; it is only dependent on planes, and since donors are not willing to pay for the transport of planes, then there will be a general disaster in this area."
Even now, the team of foreign specialists from the French group "Doctors Without Borders," who operate a feeding center in Akon, say their stocks are running precariously low. If a plane does not come within the next few days, they say, the situation will be catastrophic.
But the feeding center is only taking care of small children and other categories of people regarded as the most vulnerable and most needy. That is about two thousand of the six thousand people estimated to live in the immediate vicinity of Akon. No one can say how many more, like young Kon and Mr. Wol Wol, are struggling for survival in the parched countryside -- their presence uncounted, their plight all too real.
The vagaries of nature are made even worse by the fighting in the area, as the government unleashes its latest offensive against the rebels. The Clinton administration estimates the fighting has caused the displacement of 200-thousand people. In the south, near the border with Uganda, terror comes from the sky as government planes fly overhead and drop their bombs. Farther north, terror comes on horseback as Arab militia, described by rebels and relief workers, cut a swath of destruction through the countryside. A woman in southern Sudan tells correspondent Belida her experience:
Awut Buth is about 45 years old. But she looks far older as she speaks to some visitors along a dirt path outside Akon, a small rebel-held village in south Sudan’s remote Bahr el-Ghazal province. She fled here with several other members of her family after Arab militia swept through her hometown some 40 kilometers away -- killing, looting, raping, and kidnapping, she says.
Looking haggard and weary, wearing just a tattered skirt, she says these Islamic warriors, or mujahedin, killed her husband and one of her children. She says another three children were captured and taken away.
She does not know what has happened to them. But rebel officials, relief workers and human rights organizations say it is quite probable they will become slaves in the north.
Bona Baang Dhol is the senior commander of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army in northern Bahr el-Ghazal. He says several hundred children have been kidnapped by the militia in recent weeks.
"These people ... they convert them to be Muslims. If you are a Christian, you are told to change your name. For example, you are called Joseph, you are now called 'Yusuf' and you will no longer be called Joseph.”
According to the commander and foreign relief workers, about ten-thousand to eleven-thousand regular troops and mujahedin recently passed through this area along the railway line that runs to Wau, one of the Khartoum government's strongholds in the south. It is thought these are some of the forces being used in the current government offensive farther south, along Sudan’s border with Uganda -- an offensive regarded as the biggest yet in the more than decade old civil war.
Commander Baang Dhol says there is little military activity now along the northern front. But he is bracing for more trouble, possibly including bombing attacks by government aircraft. Relief workers in the Akon area have already built a bomb shelter.
Still, the commander appears untroubled. He insists the government cannot win the war. It may take control of all the major cities and towns, but he says Khartoum can never control all of the countryside.
"A guerrilla cannot be finished [defeated]. If you go to the river now and fish, I think you will not finish (catch) all the fish in the river. The same thing (is true) for the guerrilla..."
The latest fighting, and the resulting displacement of tens of thousand of southern Sudanese, comes at a critical time, though. The planting season is drawing near -- yet people are already short of food, a problem accentuated by the worst drought in years, along with pest infestations and shortages of tools and seeds.
The few foreign relief workers in the Akon area are trying to do what they can to alleviate the suffering, treating the sick and combat-injured, handing out food to children and others in the gravest danger of starvation.
They are also trying to dig new wells, to ease a growing water supply problem as local rivers begin to dry up.
But between the fighting and the famine, one Sudanese man says, the people are suffering a lot.
Those displaced, many of them very young, roaming the region and then escaping into neighboring nations, sometimes numbering in the thousands, form a new and melancholy children's crusade. One of them said, "we think God is punishing us."
Meanwhile, back home, familiar songs are being sung in their absence as a quiet night descends on a southern village. But as correspondent Belida concludes in this report, that serenity is deceptive:
By night, under moonlight that silhouettes the reed huts and palm trees, the sounds of singing children suggest that all is well in this southern Sudanese village.
But the image is a deceptive one. for here in Akon, in rebel-held territory in Sudan’s Bahr el-Ghazal province, hunger and disease are widespread and they are claiming lives daily -- far more lives than the fighting that flares from time to time nearby.
Nyon Kwach was about 45 years old when he died this morning -- from hunger, a local relief worker says.
His wife is out hunting for something to eat and still has not returned. She does not yet know her husband is dead. The man's brother digs his grave, hacking away at the hard-packed earth with a crude spade as the unrelenting tropical sun beats down. One of the dead man's sons relieves him while he talks with visitors.
The brother, Nyon Akech, says it is not the first time death has struck the family since its members fled to Akon to escape nearby fighting and to find food. Three children have already died of hunger.
Just several hundred meters away from the gravesite is a feeding center run by the French group "Doctors Without Borders." There, aid workers are trying to save the lives of other children.
These children, most of them too weak or too sick to lift their heads, sit with their mothers, waiting for milk and medicine.
Arwal Majok is one of those mothers. She says she came on foot from a village 12 hours away from Akon with three children, one of whom died along the way.
Her husband has gone to Khartoum, she says, to look for food. She says she left their home after it was burned down during a recent government offensive against rebel-held areas.
Only her baby is getting assistance. She says she and her other surviving child receive nothing unless they take some of the baby's ration.
The relief workers say that is part of what they describe as a vicious circle. They feed the weakest and most vulnerable, discharging them after their bodies have regained weight and strength. But once they leave, the patients are likely to once again encounter the same food shortage problems that got them into the center in the first place.
They will again weaken. In Akon, there are as yet few of the living skeletons that are the most vivid reminders of past African famines. But Veronique Priem, leader of the "Doctors Without Borders" team in the village, says that could change rapidly.
“For the moment, you will not be shocked when you go around. It’s a normal village with a normal life and people. You are not shocked by the situation. But when you know, especially, we are in February and the next harvest will be in September and you know the people have nothing . . . what can they do?"
The planting season is coming. But at the moment, aid workers like Ms. Priem fear most of the population may be too weak to work the fields unless more food arrives. They say that right now, if aircraft arrive with seeds for cultivation, the people are likely to eat them. At the same time, though, they say that unless the planting is done, there will be no harvest later in the year and the vicious circle of aid dependency will continue and widen.
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