From NPR

In the shadows of West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, food shortages are starting to develop.

This time of year is traditionally the lean season in West Africa, when last year’s harvest of rice or groundnuts is mostly exhausted. Until recently, people were quite hopeful about the approaching harvest this year.

“The rainfall situation was very good,” says Shukri Ahmed, a senior economist with the U.N.’s in Rome. “We were actually developing an optimistic forecast for crop production this year.”

But then came Ebola.

The first food source that disappeared from markets was “bush meat,” meat from forest animals. Some of those animals, like , can actually carry Ebola, so governments have banned it.

Other foods have become scarce as a side effect of efforts to keep the virus from spreading.

, the FAO’s acting representative in Sierra Leone, says that when governments stopped people from moving from country to country, or even from one town to another, it stopped traders from delivering food to the markets. “The primary impact has been on the mobility of most of the traders,” he says.

The Liberian government delivered bags of rice, beans and cooking oil to residents of the West Point slum in Monrovia. The community has been quarantined because of the Ebola outbreak in the area.

In quarantined areas, some food markets have been shut down completely.

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