Aid agencies warn four million may die in Africa
GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN
CHIEF NEWS CORRESPONDENT
AID agencies are warning of a fresh catastrophe looming in Africa that may dwarf the crises in Niger and the Sahel, putting four million lives at risk.
Severe food shortages are beginning to hit southern Africa, with Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe worst affected. Some ten million people are reported to be facing severe food shortages, with the crisis set to peak between November and February.
As was the case in Niger, aid has been slow coming in. The appeals for assistance for those countries affected by the tsunami earlier in the year, coupled with the Niger appeal and now the hurricane-affected United States, appear to have depleted resources and created a threat of donor fatigue.
Oxfam is urging United Nations member states to commit an additional $1 billion into a UN emergency reserve fund to enable resources to be released when they are needed.
Yesterday one of the aid agencies senior African officials, the Malawi country manager Nellie Nyang'wam, warned that the fate of millions of people depended on the international response.
"If we respond, we will save lives," she said. "If there is no response, we will lose more lives."
She estimated that 30 to 40 per cent of the ten million people expected to be affected by food shortages would be in danger of losing their lives.
"Even with a response, there will be severe suffering," she said, adding: "The Niger crisis was forecast six months in advance, yet rich countries did almost nothing until the 11th hour. People died as a direct result.
"Now, there is an impending crisis in southern Africa. The situation is very different, but the principle is the same. If rich countries wait, once again, until TV crews arrive before giving enough money, people in southern Africa will pay the price of their neglect."
The international community, and the UN in particular, was heavily criticised last month for failing to react to the warnings over Niger, where only a last-minute rush of aid averted a complete disaster. Then, as now, aid agencies had been warning for months that a combination of severe drought and other factors would be impossible to overcome.
In the case of southern Africa, the fear is that a population already weakened by the spread of HIV/AIDS will be less able to withstand the additional strain of famine.
Ms Nyang'wam, who was visiting Scotland yesterday, conceded that there was a risk that other disasters might make it harder to raise money for another African famine.
But she said: "It is simply not good enough to make excuses when so many lives are at stake. We have to respond when these events occur. It is not good enough to stand by just because disasters all happen at once."
Oxfam started food distribution in Malawi this week. The agency estimates that four million people are at risk there, just three years after the last major famine to hit the country.
Another four million people are at risk in Zimbabwe, one million in Zambia, 400,000 in Mozambique, 500,000 in Lesotho and 200,000 in Swaziland.
Oxfam blames a "cycle of deepening poverty" for the impending crisis. The agency says that the ability of people in the region to deal with the failure of the rain has been hampered by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and other economic factors.
The UN is due to discuss the request for emergency funding at a summit in New York on 14 September.
Judith Robertson, the head of Oxfam in Scotland, urged the UN to come up with a permanent fund that could be used to avert future crises.
"Rich countries spend $1 billion every day on supporting their farmers. If they pledged the same amount every year to a permanent emergency fund at the UN, preventable crises like Niger and southern Africa would not happen because money would be available as soon as a country needed it," she said.
The next harvest in southern Africa is due in March and although there has been sufficient rain in some parts of the region, long dry spells at crucial points in the growing season have hit the development of the maize crop.
While there are some food surpluses available in the region, in South Africa, Tanzania and north Mozambique, the problem is a shortage of funds in the affected countries to pay for it.
The two countries expected to be hardest hit are Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries, where life expectancy is a mere 39 years, and Zimbabwe, where the policies of Robert Mugabe's government have been blamed for creating avoidable hardship. |
