The UN food agency has said that AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa would leave 20 million children without parents to feed them in less than a decade.
The World Food Programme's executive director James Morris said 11 million AIDS orphans already without a mother or father to cultivate crops in southern Africa would be joined by anothernine million in seven years.
"If you go to a family that is touched by AIDS, the first thing they will ask you for is food to feed their family. Food is the critical ingredient in keeping an individual healthy to resist AIDS," he told a news conference in Lisbon.
The WFP earlier this month launched an appeal for $308 million to fund 540,000 tonnes of aid to prevent starvation in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland.
"What I am most concerned about today is the issue of HIV/AIDS in Africa, especially as it relates to children, families and agriculture," he said.
Morris added that AIDS sufferers also needed to be well fed to fight off the deadly disease, which threatens to wipe out the bulk of southern Africa's economically active population if current trends continue.
"To see half the families in Africa led by somebody in their seventies, because all the parents are gone - the impact of this on food production is immense," he added.
The WFP aims to halve the 800 million people who go hungry by 2015, but had been under additional strain this year from war in Iraq and Liberia, and famine in the Horn of Africa.
Morris said the WFP needed to spend one billion euros ($1.12 billion) more this year than last, and its 2003 budget for Africa was bigger than for the whole world in 2002.
But he was optimistic that Iraq, with all of its 27 million people currently being fed by the WFP, in the biggest operation of its kind, would be less of a burden in the near future.
"Iraq, because of the magnitude of the enterprise, is a hugeundertaking...it's unprecedented," Morris said. "Hopefully, insix months from now, Iraq will be back on its own and able tofeed itself."