Southern Africa facing ‘crisis’ - UN

Aid officials and government leaders from around southern Africa met today in an effort to stave off a potential famine across the region.

An estimated 12.8 million people in six southern African countries are on the brink of starvation, the UN World Food Programme has warned.

Without immediate international aid to provide food until the next harvest in April, many will die.

‘‘We see this as a crisis of enormous dimensions. The situation worsens with each day and clearly needs urgent attention,’’ Jean-Jacques Graisse, the WFP’s deputy executive director told the meeting in Johannesburg.

The region needs 1.2 million tons in immediate emergency aid and about four million tons to make it through the year, according to the WFP and the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The two-day meeting was called to discuss the implications of the crisis and to develop a coordinated response.

‘‘This is a unique opportunity for us to come to a consensus on the required joint approach,’’ Graisse said.

The meeting included aid workers, diplomats from Western donor nations and officials from the affected countries: Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique.

The situation was not yet a full-blown humanitarian crisis, but could turn into one as food from last month’s harvest runs out in the coming months, aid officials said.

Though poor weather has created the problem, government mismanagement has exacerbated it in many affected countries, they added.

‘‘You have a variety of non-natural disaster items that have complicated the situation,’’ Graisse said.

In Malawi, the government inexplicably sold off its 167,000 ton corn reserve just before the crisis started. It is investigating what happened to much of the money from that sale.

In Zimbabwe, the government’s chaotic efforts to seize white-owned commercial farmland and redistribute it to landless blacks has sharply reduced the amount of commercial farmland dedicated to growing corn.

Zimbabwean Finance Minister Simba Makoni admitted yesterday that his government’s land policies had worsened the crisis.

‘‘It compounds, it exacerbates, but it is not the primary cause of the problem,’’ he said at a World Economic Forum gathering in Durban.

The crisis meeting in Johannesburg sought to address these issues of government accountability and allay donor countries’ concerns about giving aid to governments viewed as unreliable, said Ross Mountain, deputy head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The meeting also planned to address related needs in the affected countries, including the lack of clean water and the Aids pandemic that could greatly exacerbate the crisis.