A FAMINE in southern Africa is worsening, experts say, with the United Nations warning that more than five million people will need emergency food aid. The Red Cross added that Aids was an exacerbating factor.
Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders – MSF) said last week it had found an entire town of 18 000 people in remote southwestern Angola dying of hunger.
”A whole hillside is covered by thousands of graves dug since September,” said MSF doctor Mercedes Tatai.
But funds are coming in too slowly: aid agencies have warned for years of ”donor fatigue” with Africa, where catastrophes never seem to end, and much of the world’s aid is being diverted now to places such as Afghanistan – itself the victim of donor fatigue for many years.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP), which is already feeding 2,6 million famine victims in southern Africa, appealed in March for an initial $69-million to buy food for the region.
The response was minimal.
Near the end of April, WFP regional director Judith Lewis said funds pledged amounted to just three million dollars.
On May 2, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies launched an appeal for around four million dollars to provide support for about 450 000 AIDS sufferers threatened by famine in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
”It’s clear the situation will worsen very quickly,” said Guy Zimmermann, a nutrition expert at the federation’s Geneva headquarters.
The region has the highest Aids rates in the world, with 15% to 20% of the adult population estimated to be HIV-positive.
About three million children in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe have been orphaned by Aids, the Red Cross estimates, and hundreds of thousands of households are now headed by children.
The WFP is now finalising a regional plan to tackle the drought, reporting officer Inyene Udoyen said on Friday.
”A regional approach is being considered and a regional strategy could come out before” the end of June, he said.
A crop assessment is underway in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, Udoyen added.
Malawi is facing its worst hunger crisis in 50 years, affecting 76% of the country’s 11 million people.
In Zimbabwe, where the WFP says land invasions have compounded drought, state media say 7,8 million people will need food aid.
In Zambia, more than 1,2 million people out of a population of 10 million have been hit by the famine, the result of floods in some parts of the country and drought in others.
In March, the parliament said at least 33 people had died of starvation.
The government is now encouraging farmers to grow Zambia’s first ever winter maize crop in a bid to fight the famine, but farmers say there will not be enough water.
In Angola, the WFP says supplies to feed one million people are running out, as aid workers find more hungry people in parts of the country once cut off by civil war.
Ronald Sibanda, WFP’s director in Angola, says the agency needs $52 million to cope there.
In Mozambique, devastating floods in 2000 that killed 700 people turned into breeding grounds for insects, including locusts, which fed on surviving crops.
Lesotho’s Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili formally declared last month that that tiny mountain kingdom was suffering from serious famine and Swaziland says that more than 150 000 of its one million people face starvation if the situation does not improve soon.
Throughout the region, villagers are foraging for wild berries and roots, and even eating green maize.
Children are kept out of school, or arrive exhausted through lack of food.
”We did not harvest anything and so we have nothing to eat or feed our children,” said Jean Chimuka at the hospital in Monze, a small farming town in Zambia, where she had brought her malnourished baby for treatment.
Other parents have literally lived at the hospital since their children were admitted and put on a special diet.
In Angola, the WFP’s Sibanda said: ”We have no choice but to reduce rations for some groups of people to make sure we can feed others who are more desperate.”
Lewis, the WFP director for eastern and southern Africa, told the story of a Mozambican man she discovered diving repeatedly into the crocodile-infested Shire River to gather water-lily bulbs.
When she asked him why he was risking his life, he replied: ”I have no alternative – I have nothing to feed my children.” – Sapa-AFP