JOHANNESBURG, Dec 17 (AFP) - Southern Africa is facing unprecedented famine, but rich countries are failing to provide enough aid to feed more than 14 million people -- many weakened by AIDS -- threatened with death by starvation, relief agencies say.
"What is new is AIDS ... This is what has destroyed the agricultural workers," said UN special envoy Stephen Lewis as he began a tour of the region in December.
He attacked rich nations for their "hypocrisy and double standards" toward Africa.
"It's upsetting to see the slowness with which the world is responding to the humanitarian crisis," Lewis said.
"We know there is a lot of money out there but something must be profoundly wrong somewhere. Something is morally wrong."
In Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, 14.4 million people are under threat, plus another 400,000 people in Namibia, where the government is coping by itself, and close to two million in Angola, largely as a result of civil war.
The UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned mid-year that it needed 507 million dollars for the first six countries, but as 2002 drew to a close it had received pledges totalling just 286 million dollars.
It is also combating famine in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where a similar number of people are under threat.
In southern Africa, the worst affected country is Zimbabwe, where 6.8 million of its 11 million people are under threat.
They could start dying in the first three months of 2003, the WFP is warning.
Only 56 percent of the aid needed in Zimbabwe is arriving, and in several regions many villagers have nothing to eat but wild fruit and roots.
The effects there of the drought, and AIDS -- more than a third of Zambian adults are HIV-positive -- have been aggravated by President Robert Mugabe's policy of confiscating white commercial farms to split them up among pro-government supporters.
That violent campaign has sent agricultural production plummeting, with the Central Bank saying output in 2001 fell 13 percent.
2imbabwe needs 600,000 tonnes of food aid by the end of March, the agencies say.
In Zambia, where close to a third of the 10 million people are under threat, President Levy Mwanawasa has refused to accept genetically modified grain as food aid, aggravating the situation to an "alarming" extent, WFP says.
Hundreds of tonnes of such grain were stored in warehouses without being distributed, enraging starving villages who pillaged at least two of the warehouses.
The government is now looking at importing non genetically modified grain from Tanzania and South Africa.
It needs 150,000 tonnes.
In Malawi, 3.3 million people, 30 percent of the population, need relief food. The shortfall there is 240,000 tonnes.
Lesotho and Swaziland, where around a third of the inhabitants are under threat, need respectively 36,000 et 20,000 tonnes of emergency food aid.
Mozambique is the least affected of the six countries, with only three percent of its population, essentially those living in the south, needing emergency food.
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