Urgent Talks to Stem Famine Crisis in Southern Africa

Nearly 13 million people in southern Africa face famine in the coming months because drought, floods and political upheaval have nearly halved grain production in the region this year, the United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP) warned yesterday.

UN agencies, donors and agricultural experts met in Johannesburg to coordinate appeals for about 4m tonnes of food until the next harvest, a year from now, and the massive logistical effort of delivering it to the hungry.

"This is a crisis of enormous dimensions," the WFP's deputy director, Jean-Jacques Graisse, said. "The situation worsens with each day and needs urgent attention. The latest assessments indicate that 12.8 million people could face starvation in the year ahead. The situation will not improve until at least the next harvest in April 2003, and it could even get worse."

Starvation is not the only threat. With HIV rampant in the region, undernourishment can weaken the immune system and accelerate the onset of full-blown Aids.

The food crisis has been brought about by a variety of calamities, from the severest drought in 20 years in Zambia to tornadoes in Lesotho, and has been compounded by the land invasions in Zimbabwe.

The WFP said the number of people at risk will escalate in the coming months after the widespread failure of crops in the recent harvest.

The organisation estimates that 7.7 million people in southern Africa already need food aid. That number will rise to 11.4 million by September and 12.8 million by the end of the year.

Other organisations, such as the UK's Save the Children, estimate that the crisis will even tually affect 19 million people.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has identified six countries where the crisis is particularly acute. Worst hit is Zimbabwe, where farm invasions and drought cut this year's harvest by nearly two-thirds. The UN estimates that 6 million Zimbabweans - nearly half the population - will need food donations to survive.

"The longest dry spell experienced in Zimbabwe in 20 years has made the food situation especially dire," said the FAO in its latest report. "This has been compounded by the sharp fall in maize produced by commercial farmers who normally produce one-third of the total cereals, but whose farming operations were disrupted by the ongoing land reform activities and widespread illegal invasions."

Yesterday, Zimbabwe's finance minister, Simba Makoni, admitted that the land crisis had exacerbated food shortages.

The figures from Malawi and Zambia are no less disturbing. More than 2 million people in Malawi will require food aid by September, and that number will rise by another million before the end of the year. Meanwhile, the government is struggling to explain why it sold its 167,000-tonne emergency grain reserve last year.

In Zambia, hundreds have died of starvation and the government has declared a state of emergency. More than a million people need help, and that figure is expected to double by the end of the year.

Joanne Muté, the relief coordinator of the charity Tearfund, said the crisis in the south of the country was acute.

"Families here are existing by eating roots, and even rats when they can find them. Many only get food at all every couple of days. This is not a warning of famine - we are seeing it happen now," she said.

Mozambique, affected by floods, Swaziland, suffering drought, and Lesotho, hit by severe frost, hailstorms and tornadoes, account for another 1.2 million people at risk.

More than 100,000 people urgently need food in Angola - but that is deemed a separate crisis, brought to light by former rebel-held areas opening up with the end of the civil war.

Yesterday, the WFP warned: "The numbers could go up, and could go up significantly. They are presuming a certain amount of food is going to arrive commercially, but there's no guarantee.

"Last year, there was all this commercial food that was promised in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, but it just didn't come. That forced up prices and forced a lot of people down into the vulnerable category because they could no longer afford to buy the food that was available."