JOHANNESBURG, Oct 26, 2006 (AFP) - The United Nation's food agency Thursday said a huge gap in funding could see food aid cut to up to 4.3 million people in the southern Africa region.
"The 60-million-dollar funding shortfall comes just as the annual "lean season" approaches, when people have to wait until next March or April for the next harvest," a statement by the World Food Programme (WFP) said.
"If the situation doesn't improve, more people, especially children who are poorly nourished, are more likely to die before reaching their teens," said WFP regional director Amir Abdulla.
WFP said the cash crunch could force "food aid cuts to as many as 4.3 million people across southern Africa who remain chronically vulnerable despite this year's reportedly good harvests across the region.
"After the good harvests were reported, WFP scaled down general food assistance to concentrate on the people with the most chronic needs, such as those with HIV/AIDS," said Abdulla.
"Here, where HIV prevalence rates are the highest in the world, people are dying of AIDS-related illness when they could have survived for years if they had had enough food to eat. Anti-retroviral therapy is not effective on an empty stomach."
WFP said the worst-hit countries included Malawi, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, with the latter being home to 1.4 million people in need of crucial food aid.
Abdulla said the WFP had identified 1.4 million people in Zimbabwe being in critical need of food aid in May this year but was forced to scale down operations in October "to roughly half of the 900,000 people it was originally targeting."
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