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FEWS Chad Food Security Emergency: Lack of security increases vulnerability

Security conditions along the border are troubling humanitarian organizations and heightening the vulnerability of host communities
The beginning of this year was marked by a visible deterioration in security conditions in host areas for the country's refugee population, particularly along the Chadian-Sudanese border, where nearly 205,000 Sudanese refugees have settled. As a result, we are seeing:

- A disruption in grain flows in an already grain-short area, curtailing grain access in host communities;

- A temporary 20% cut in the UNHCR staff, followed by the suspension of certain community services as announced by the UNHCR on January 22nd;

- A steady influx of refugees, with the size of the population of the 12 refugee camps in eastern Chad estimated by the WFP and the UNHCR at 205,600 during the week of 2/16/06-2/22/06;

- Efforts to relocate the d'Am-Nabak and Bahaï refugee camps lying directly on the border.

There has been a certain amount of improvement in the food situation in refugee camps since the last quarter of 2005. However, while the current WFP pipeline is able to ensure complete rations for residents of all refugee camps up until the month of March, there are already indications of future supply-side problems with CSB (corn-soya-blend) rations for camps in the south, with the threat of a shortage looming as early as March in the event of the elimination of CSB by the WFP, in which case the ration would be 2,100 kcal, but without any CSB. The food situation in these camps could become alarming, since CSB is the main staple in the supplementary ration.

As far as the host population is concerned, the pressure of wave after wave of refugees on the area's meager natural resources has engendered frequent disputes over the use of resources such as pasture, fuelwood and water. Radical measures are being taken to relieve congestion in certain camps such as the transfer of 8,000 refugees from the Bredjing camp to the Gaga camp scheduled to take place in mid-February.

From a food access standpoint, host communities in refugee settlement areas are not targeted directly by distributions of food aid. This forces them to contend with local market prices or grain deficits, in addition to which the disruption of market-regulating grain flows by security problems exposes poor and middle-income households to exceedingly high grain prices in the face of their sharply eroded purchasing power.

There has been some improvement in health and nutrition conditions in certain refugee camps, particularly in the southern part of the country, which is showing a global malnutrition rate of <10% as of the end of December of last year.

Since December, some 4,800 refugees, mainly women and children, have sought asylum in Chad, fleeing the growing violence in northern areas of the Central African Republic. A first wave of 516 refugees (or 98 families) was resettled in the Gondjé camp on January 26, 2006 at a distance of 13 kilometers from Goré. According to the UNHCR report for January of this year, there is a steady flow of new refugees arriving in small groups of approximately 20 persons a day.