A rchive Date
[ 15-06-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Africa ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/1951875
Crops in, but many in Africa go hungry
By LYDIA POLGREEN New York Times
June 14, 2003, 5:13PM
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Despite a bumper crop of grain and plentiful rains this harvest season, food shortages remain a serious problem in large pockets of southern Africa, according to a U.N. agency report.
While nowhere near the severe shortages several countries faced last harvest season, when floods and drought severely damaged crops, aid workers said that even with the best weather conditions and with much international help, many nations in southern Africa will be unable to feed their people.
"This year's production is better than last year," said Henri Josserand of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, who has been monitoring the harvests in several countries that faced famine last year. "But it is not exceptional by any means."
As desperate as conditions are becoming in the south, they are dwarfed by food shortages in the northeastern countries of Eritrea and Ethiopia. In Eritrea, war and drought have left more than 2 million people - over 60 percent of the population - without enough food, according to U.N. officials. In Ethiopia, they added, up to 12 million people need food.
The six countries in southern Africa that officials are watching closely - Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, Zambia and Swaziland - managed to produce two-thirds of the food they need, a marked improvement over last year, the report found. But poor infrastructure and the continued devastation wrought by AIDS mean there are large areas that will go hungry.
In northern Mozambique, for example, there is a surplus of grain, and because that region's neighbors, Zambia and Malawi, also had good harvests, there is a limited market for the surplus, driving prices down, Josserand said. Yet within its own borders Mozambique faces hunger among nearly 1 million people in the central and southern regions, the report found, because with few passable roads and no rail or water links, getting food to the south is prohibitively expensive.
In Zimbabwe, where large, white-owned farms have been taken over by squatters, production of grain has plummeted. The country grows half of what it grew five years ago, the report said, and as a result 7.2 million people, half of the country's population, will need help getting food.
"The message today is that we are still in crisis," said Judith Lewis, the World Food Program's regional director for southern Africa. "We continue to grapple with a very dependent society reliant on rain-fed agriculture."
In that context, Lewis said, AIDS makes a bad problem worse. She said there are 4 million orphans in southern Africa, and many households are headed by a child or an elderly grandparent. In places where subsistence agriculture is the only viable way of life, the loss of a healthy adult can mean starvation or worse for an entire family.
"We are seeing the most productive members of society dying," Lewis said.
The report showed that most countries need long-term help developing infrastructure and improving their farming, education and health care systems to be able to feed their populations in the coming decades, Lewis said.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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