By Tereza Jeremiah Chuei
The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management Peter Mayen Majongdit yesterday said that the government is planning to reserve food to mitigate the current predicted hunger in the country.
Mayen revealed that government is facing the challenge in the process because some of the neighboring countries like Uganda have stopped selling their food.
However, Mayen cautioned that farmers in the country should be encouraged to cultivate to increase and boost the agriculture sector in this particular time that the country is in dire need due to food shortage.
In an inclusive interview with No.1 Citizen Daily Newspaper, Mayen disclosed that the country is going to face more food shortage, saying that citizens should try as much as possible to cultivate any type of crops that they should be able to cultivate in their capacity.
“We have to preposition some food, make sure that we reserve food in our storage, into areas that we cannot reach when the rain season starts, and also make sure that we are food reserve, farmers should be encouraged to cultivate too, “he said.
“The State or the government is the one to reserve the food, so we are trying our best to work hard for the future that is coming, but the difficulty now is that some other countries like Uganda now refused to sell their food,” he added.
Meanwhile, Mayen said that even though South Sudan is in humanitarian insufficiency currently, but still ‘it’s not hopeless’ adding that the country can still come out of this humanitarian situation.
“We have been facing humanitarian insufficiency in areas of health, cross-cutting issues like gender issues, health protection, all these have added to humanitarian insufficiency and South Sudan has been food insecure, now that there is major threat to the world, not South Sudan alone is facing this but its rather a global threat, this situation will worsen far more than it’s now,” he explained.
However, Mayen further explained as to why the world and South Sudan in particular is economically unstable “war in Ukraine has affected the world, and South Sudan is not exempted from it, because it has affected the oil industry which in return has affected the economic situation which has led some families not to afford food for themselves and so on”.
Mayen further said that the country will be affected, however what is needed is for the country to invest in agriculture.
“We will be affected, because what needs to be done now is to invest in the agriculture so that farmers in the county level can be able to restore some food, or the hope is that anyone should at least cultivate in his two to three meters land some okra for instants, I believe this can help, even if we know we are not in good situation now we still know that there is no situation that is permanent,” he pointed out.