World Vision is call­ing for dona­tions to help with the new drought in India. Drought is affect­ing North and Cen­tral India, while floods are wash­ing away crops in South­ern India. Food prices have already sharply increased due to the weather.

From this World Vision press release, we read more about the food inse­cu­rity in India.

Mas­sive food short­ages are now impact­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of Indi­ans with floods and droughts set­ting back efforts to com­bat poverty by years, warns World Vision.

The fail­ure of the mon­soon in the north, north­east and some parts of west­ern India, has resulted in 22% below nor­mal rains for the coun­try. Mil­lions of farm­ers are now suf­fer­ing from failed har­vests or crops destroyed by flood waters. Any rains would now come to late to help farmers.

“India is now enter­ing a period of severe food vul­ner­a­bil­ity,” said Dr Jayaku­mar Chris­t­ian, National Direc­tor for World Vision India. “We are see­ing our devel­op­ment work set back by years.” He said 350 mil­lion Indi­ans were drought affected — includ­ing in 52 of World Vision’s 135 project areas a.

Dr Chris­t­ian said the floods in South­ern India had caught peo­ple and the gov­ern­ment by sur­prise, leav­ing 1.5 mil­lion home­less and over 200 dead. Over 200,000 homes had been destroyed.

“The sud­den floods came as a real shock to peo­ple liv­ing in Kar­nataka, Andhra Pradesh and Maha­rash­tra because the region has not expe­ri­enced any­thing like this in more than 100 years. These are not dis­as­ter prone areas,” he said.

World Vision is now appeal­ing for USD$2 mil­lion to meet the imme­di­ate needs of flood sur­vivors who have been dri­ven from their homes into relief camps. Those floods have destroyed crops and impacted some 20 mil­lion peo­ple, with scores of vil­lages cut off.

The agency’s relief work­ers have been pro­vid­ing cooked food, fam­ily packs of house­hold items, mos­quito nets, cook­ing uten­sils and cloth­ing to thou­sands of sur­vivors in relief camps in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Kar­nataka as part of an ini­tial USD$200,000 response. Aid sup­port would extend to thou­sands more peo­ple over the com­ing days.

World Vision hopes to raise USD$2million to ramp up its response to meet the needs of 100,000 people.

Dr Chris­t­ian said: “Rates of mal­nour­ish­ment are already extremely high in India. Almost half of all under-fives are mal­nour­ished and these droughts and floods are push­ing fam­i­lies to the very edge. What is needed is a mas­sive coor­di­nated response involv­ing the fed­eral and cen­tral gov­ern­ments, and local and inter­na­tional NGOs to make sure food aid gets through.”

With­out assis­tance he warned that crop fail­ures and losses would lead to:

Mass migra­tion from rural areas to the cities Increased indebt­ed­ness among farm­ers Par­ents pulling chil­dren out of school to work instead Increased vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties for chil­dren, includ­ing the risk of chil­dren being traf­ficked into labour or sex­ual exploitation

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