Food Security Framework | Underlying Factors

• Protracted insurgency and civil insecurity have limited IDPs? movements and access to adequate land to cultivate crops over many years leading to their limited capacity to produce and access adequate food supplies.
• Breakdown of traditional livelihoods and limited livelihood options for IDP communities who have over the years experienced diminished community buffer and coping mechanisms that limit their ability to manage food insecurity through own mechanisms during this period.
• Inadequate access to other basic non food services, such as water, health, and sanitation limit IDPs? proper utilization of available food and thus food insecurity.
• Recent peace efforts enable some movement and gradual relocation of the IDPs; expect food security to improve if civil security, adequate access to land, and normal climatic conditions hold for the next 12 to 18 months.
• Unreliable climatic conditions in Karamoja?s unimodal season, sporadic civil insecurity, and livestock diseases are major factors that affect food security in Karamoja, northeastern Uganda. These conditions have rendered many Karimojong generally chronically food insecure group who suffer varying levels of food scarcity. Depending on the previous year?s production, the ?hunger period? normally extends from April to July when stocks are least or depleted.
• Three livelihood groups ? cultivators, agropastoralists, and pastoralists ? are normally affected by food insecurity, in that order. Agropastoralists grow crops and keep livestock and use both to cater for food, while pastoralists minimally cultivate and mainly purchase grains from markets utilizing their livestock. Poorer households without livestock are most affected as they normally lack livestock to exchange for cereals. Depending on the severity of the dry season, livestock may move further away from homesteads in search of pastures and water, reducing pastoral households? access to milk and other products.
• Even with a normal crop season or timely onset of rains, the Karimojong normally go through a hunger period ?April to July? when stocks are the lowest or none at all. This period may start as early as February or March following a particularly poor harvest in the past year.
• Presence or outbreak of or increase in incidence of livestock diseases, such as Pest des Petits Ruminants, a highly contagious disease affecting sheep and goats in Karamoja