ROME, Dec 1 (AFP) - Violence against women, male promiscuity and the patriarchal treatment of women is helping to spread the AIDS epidemic into rural Africa "with alarming speed", the UN food agency reported Friday.

Social factors also meant that infection rates among women and girls were three to times higher in rural Africa than among men and boys, said the Rome-based Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

"The epidemic is spreading with alarming speed into the remotest villages, cutting food production and threatening the very life of rural committees," said the FAO.

Officials pointed to sexual violence against women as one factor in the transmission of HIV, the virus which causes AIDS.

The tradition in some societies in which a man marries his brother's widow was another cause of the rapid spread of the disase if the first husband had died of AIDS-related complications, said Marcela Villareal of the FAO's population programme service during a symposium on AIDS.

Studies have also found that rural widows who lost access to their husband's property, could be forced into prostitution to survive, she added.

Women whose husbands are migrant workers are especially vulnerable to AIDS, as their spouses may have other sexual partners.

As well as agriculture, the HIV/AIDS epidemic also hit economic sectors that have large numbers of mobile or migratory workers, such as transport and mining.

Of the 34 million people living with HIV/AIDS, 96 percent live in the developing countries, with most of those hit living in rural areas.

Although Africa accounts for only one tenth of the world's population, it has nine out of 10 new cases of the disease. Eighty-three percent of deaths from AIDS occur in Africa.

Since 1985, AIDS has killed some seven million agricultural workers in the 25 hardest-hit African countries and 16 million more could be killed before 2020.

FAO put the projected 1985-2020 loss in agricultural labor force through AIDS in southern and eastern African countries at between 26 percent in Namibia and 13 percent in Tanzania.

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