HEALTH-SOUTHERN AFRICA: AIDS Worsens Food Shortage

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ananilea Nkya

DAR ES SALAAM, Aug 27 2003 (IPS) - Food shortages, facing Southern Africa, will worsen if actions are not taken urgently to stop the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, aid agencies warn.

Margaret Nyirenda, head of the Food, Agriculture and Human Resources at the Southern African Development Community (SADC) secretariat, told journalists this week that the HIV/AIDS vulnerabilities at household levels impact on food production in the region.

By March, an estimated 15.3 million people from Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe needed about two million metric tonnes of relief aid, Nyirenda said.

“This was in addition to the requirement in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where the United Nations was already operating,” she said. “The food shortages were caused mainly by two droughts in a row, plus floods aggravated by general reduction of resources allocation and the HIV/AIDS pandemic”.

HIV/AIDS is a major threat to food security in the region.

SADC Executive Secretary, Prega Ramsamy, said 14 million persons in the region are HIV positive, representing about 51 percent of all infections in Africa, and 37 percent in the world, thus making the region the worst affected.

“AIDS is a real monster, if we don’t do all we could to fight it, we are in a serious trouble,” he said. “We are loosing food producers, caretakers, leaders, academicians and future generation as a whole”.

As a regional response to the food crisis, Nyirenda said SADC and UN agencies in July 2002 launched an appeal for 611 million U.S. dollars for emergency food. So far, the major contributors have been the European Union, the United States and Britain.

And the beneficiaries have been the more than 18 million people in Angola, the DRC, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

“Zimbabwe is the hardest hit in food shortages, while shortages remain significant in Lesotho and Swaziland,” Nyirenda said.

However, improved weather conditions in recent months and measures taken by governments have resulted in improved food security in Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia, she said.

The March edition of SADC’s Barometer publication quoted the World Food Programme (WFP) as estimating that 7.7 million people (more than half of Zimbabwe’s population) were vulnerable. “Food Production has dropped to about one-third of previous years’ levels and the crisis is being exacerbated by the high prevalence (34 percent) of HIV/AIDS in the country”.

It noted that in all affected countries HIV/AIDS has worsened the food shortage resulting in reduced agricultural productivity, and increased demands on a declining working population for food provision.

The publication cited Malawi where 3.3 million people (or 30 percent of the population) have been receiving food aid. It said 16 percent of Malawi’s population has HIV/AIDS.

The threat posed by HIV/AIDS to SADC countries has also been noted by Johnny Strijdom, SADC Regional Drug Control Officer, who said “there is a link between increase of drug abuse and HIV infection in the region”.

“It has become apparent over the past year that SADC member states are becoming more and more affected by the full range of drug-related problems,” he observed.

Nearly 30 million people in Africa are living with HIV/AIDS, including three million children under the age of 15.

It seems international efforts are underway to help Africa contain the spread of the disease. Over the next five years the United States will spend 15 billion U.S. dollars to fight AIDS around the world, with special focus on the continent of Africa, according to President George W Bush, when he visited Africa in July.

This month South African President Thabo Mbeki signed a funding agreement with Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis. The agreement, worth 40 million U.S. dollars, has been held up in bureaucratic wrangling for about two years.