Nepal’s poor suffer as strikes hit food security -WFP

Nepal’s relentless strikes are severely impacting food security where the poor are being forced to scavenge for food and sell off assets in order to survive, a U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) official said on Wednesday.

In recent years, the impoverished Himalayan nation has seen a sharp rise in the number of strikes where everything including transport, government offices, private businesses, schools, hospitals and markets are completely shut down.

Last year, there were 254 days of strikes or “bandhs” in the country, according to Nepalbandh.com, a Nepali website which monitors strikes around the country. In the last three months, there have been over 200 strikes, according to the site.

Richard Ragan, head of WFP in Nepal, said the strikes – which are often politically motivated –meant that roads were blocked, food was not being transported and people were not able to work, losing essential income and unable to buy provisions.

“The immediate impact of the bandhs is on the poor people in the country,” Ragan told Reuters by telephone.

“It means that people lose a day’s wage and can’t make money to buy food. Also, their businesses are closed, they can’t travel to work, and they don’t have access to markets which also means they can’t purchase food if they had some money.”

COST OF STRIKES

He said this was a serious problem in Nepal as the majority of the population was spending more than 60 percent of their income on food, compared with in the United States where Americans spend slightly more than 10 percent of their income on food.

Nepal is reeling from a 10-year civil conflict that ended in 2006. The Maoist insurgency killed more than 13,000 people, displaced hundreds of thousands and devastated the economy.

The U.N. Development Programme’s 2007/8 Human Development Index ranks Nepal 142 out of 177 countries, where more than 30 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

According to Nepal’s Chamber of Commerce, between $7 and $14 million is lost in revenues every day there is a general strike.

Ragan said people were being increasingly forced to participate in the bandhs that often turned violent.

“There is a general state of lawlessness and people are using the threat of strike or the implementation of bandh to get what they want because it’s one of the few instruments that has proven to be effective, at least in the short-term,” he said.

He said in April last year, the government was forced to reverse its decision on a fuel price hike after days of strikes.

He said the impact of this on humanitarian activities was huge and WFP – which feeds around 3.5 million people in Nepal – was operating at only 50 percent of its capacity.

“People already exist on razor-thin margins. Strikes are limiting our ability to reach them during critical time periods which is pushing them over the edge.”

-Reuters