The United Nations food body urged donor countries yesterday to give food and funds to avert a deepening hunger crisis in southern Africa. The call came in a report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which said some 14 million people were in urgent need of food aid in the impoverished region.
"FAO urged donor countries to commit critically needed food aid and financial support to southern Africa to avert a large-scale humanitarian crisis," said the Rome-based organisation.
The causes of the food shortages include civil strife, drought, flooding and population displacement, said the report, released as the Earth summit opened in Johannesburg.
"The food situation in southern Africa is of grave concern," the report said. "A prolonged dry spell during the 2001/02 growing season, and excessive precipitation in parts, devastated crops in large growing areas."
The report warned that less than a quarter of the $507 million needed to provide emergency aid to the hungry until the next main harvest in April 2003 had been pledged.
Mr Shukri Ahmed, editor of the report, said Zimbabwe was hardest hit with six million people needing urgent food aid, followed by Malawi with 3.2 million, Zambia with 2.3 million, Angola with 1.4 million, Lesotho and Mozambique with half a million each, and Swaziland with 140,000 hungry people.
"People are getting weaker as we move further away from the April/May 2002 harvest period," Mr Ahmed, an FAO economist, told Reuters. "Farmers will need to be well fed, otherwise next season's food supplies will be at risk," he added.
The report said disruption of commercial farming in Zimbabwe would jeopardise planting of the staple maize crop later this year, compounding the problem of a long drought. The outlook for crop and livestock output next year was bleak.
Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe has ordered white farmers to leave their land so it can be redistributed to landless blacks, saying the measure is aimed at reversing colonialism.-(Reuters)