Resources amid ruins

KALIMA, Congo — Even with thousands of rebel fighters lurking in the jungle surrounding this once-prosperous mining town in eastern Congo, Francois Kitembele’s most pressing concern is that not enough people know how to grow tomatoes.

“The tomato sprouts are starting to shrivel from too much sun,” said Mr. Kitembele, Kalima’s mayor. He tells several people to find some sticks and dried palm fronds to make a canopy over the raised plot.

Growing tomatoes and vegetables is a serious pursuit for Mr. Kitembele, who regularly visits the town’s four feeding centers and has seen too many gangly children with swollen stomachs and black hair turning orange from malnutrition. Tens of thousands of Kalima’s residents — more than half of them are children — are nearing starvation after five years of war in a country already devastated by armed conflict.

In many ways, Kalima is a metaphor for the country’s drift into poverty, and it offers a glimpse at its hoped-for reconstruction. Despite having some of Africa’s most fertile soil and vast mineral deposits, the people here, like most other Congolese, are among the continent’s poorest.

Of the estimated 3.5 million people who have died during the conflict, the majority perished from war-induced famine and the diseases that take hold when people’s immune systems are weakened by prolonged hunger. Another half-million displaced people across Congo face severe hunger caused by the ongoing violence.

“The people who live here have benefited least from its mineral wealth,” said Mr. Kitembele. “It is pitiful to see the way we are dying. And we are powerless to get food.”

In rural northeastern Congo, the cradle of the nation’s conflict, farming has become a dangerous occupation. Gangs of rebel soldiers, mostly unpaid and untrained teenagers with machine guns, surround farms and farming villages. They plunder food supplies, livestock and farm tools.

The men are either killed or forced to work in rebel-controlled mines. The women and girls usually are raped, and some are abducted as concubines at military outposts.

Fearing attacks, families in remote, unprotected villages — where most of Congo’s 56 million people live — have sought shelter in larger towns like Kalima and Kindu, about 50 miles west of here, which were already struggling to feed their existing populations.

Some of the displaced are simply trading one risk for another: Sudden death by AK-47 or a slow death by starvation.

“Warlords and militias may have started with nationalist views, but they end up living on top of local populations, taking their harvests, their chickens and cows,” said Robert Dekker, a World Food Program coordinator in Congo.

Since July, about 700 people have been treated for severe malnutrition and 27 of them have died at just one of the feeding centers supported by Merlin, an aid group funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Washington’s foreign-aid arm. Merlin is the only aid group in a region with more than 1.1 million people.

With a lull in the fighting after the country’s main rebel factions signed a power-sharing agreement in July, more people are beginning to filter into feeding centers and hospitals in towns like Kalima.

It is against this backdrop that people are learning to cultivate their own crops, a lost art for many whose fathers and grandfathers gave up farming for more lucrative jobs in nearby Belgian-owned tin mines.

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