GUINEA: Record cold snap destroys crops, kills hundreds of
animals Saturday, February 21, 2009 Near-freezing temperatures
in north-central Guinea in January destroyed crops and livestock
on which thousands of people depend for food as well as cash.
Elderly locals told IRIN they had never seen cold this intense
in Mali, a town in Guinea’s Labé region. “The vegetation looks
as if it was burned in a fire,” Hannibal Barry of the UN Office
for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told IRIN
from Mali on 19 February during a joint evaluation by UN
agencies, local authorities and NGOs. Temperatures dropped to as
low as 1.4 degrees during the 17 to 26 January cold spell,
according to a preliminary report by the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP). The cold
wiped out crops – mainly potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, onions and
bananas – across five districts in Mali. It is not yet known how
many hectares were destroyed, Mamadou Saliou III Diallo, head of
agricultural operations a