Despite World Food Programme efforts since 2002 the food crisis in southern Africa shows no sign of abating, Bill Corcoran in Johannesburg reports
Three years ago the UN appealed to governments for emergency donations to feed an estimated 14 million people in Southern Africa because of food shortages. Recently, the appeals went out again.
According to experts, a "new kind of humanitarian crisis", consisting of a deadly combination of afflictions, is facing Southern Africa, and the emergency has just entered its most acute phase.
Despite the roll-out of feeding programmes following the 2002 appeals, the World Food Programme (WFP) maintains that the region is still teetering on the brink of disaster, with almost 10 million mouths to be fed until at least the next harvest in June.
The food crisis facing the affected countries of Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe is only partly to do with drought.
The situation is compounded by the HIV/Aids epidemic, which has engulfed the region - 22,000 people die every week from Aids - and decimated rural households, leading to the inability of infected breadwinners to provide for their families.
Unicef spokeswoman Sarah Crowe says what is so stark is that everywhere you go in the region you see orphans being cared for by their grandparents.
"What makes this different to Niger or elsewhere is exactly the HIV/Aids crisis. When there are no safety nets, no buffers, a failed harvest pushes people, and children in particular, over the edge," she says.
A reduced capacity within the institutions in each country, due to poor governance and almost always a shortage of qualified personnel, has meant vulnerable people are left with few options to secure assistance.
UN agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), in conjunction with national governments, have so far spared the region's population the scenes of famine which engulfed many parts of East Africa in the 1980s.
But if Southern Africa is facing a new kind of humanitarian food crisis with the added complexity of HIV/Aids, are effective new plans being implemented to ensure long-term solutions?
In its discussion document on the crisis the WFP says that the situation "demands transformed humanitarian and developmental responses, including longer-term commitments and new forms of management and partnership".
The WFP's Mike Huggins describes the crisis as extremely complex and says that the resources needed to combat it are currently unavailable. Indeed, the agency has a funding shortfall of $191 million for its feeding programmes between now and next June.
He suggests that the West's response needs to be two-pronged: both humanitarian and developmental; and a donation to one of the response systems needs to be matched by a similar donation to the other.
On a national level, Huggins maintains that the affected countries need to undertake massive agricultural reform and adopt measures to ensure that what food is available reaches the poorest citizens.
"There are many competing needs, but priorities have to be changed to focus resources on sustaining human life," Huggins says. "There is also the problem of behavioural change. Farmers will have to start looking at diversifying their crops, as they cannot continue to grow crops which perform poorly in a drought. Maize forms part of an African's staple diet, but it does not grow well in drought conditions."
Unicef's regional director, Per Engebak, believes that because the food crisis is occurring in countries with high HIV/Aids infection rates and weak institutional infrastructures, the solutions need to be built around the strengthening of governance.
He insists that each country will have to establish a set of effective social protection schemes so that people do not simply fall by the wayside because of the burdens of hunger, illness and despair.
"In the short term, we need to create safety nets for people affected by either poverty or HIV/Aids so that they don't fall out of touch. In terms of children, the countries could follow South Africa's lead, which has rolled out a social grant for 5.5 million of its children and has effective foster care for a further 260,000," Engebak says.
"I think there is increasingly a greater acceptance for social protection schemes among bilateral donors since they have seen that such programmes have been effective in Latin America for 20 years. In fact, I think we are seeing a tendency whereby mass infusions of aid will be phased out over a long period of time and social services, backed up by aid, will be relied on more heavily."
Both organisations say that the empowerment of women is of the utmost importance because of the high rates of HIV/Aids among the female population.
While the WFP and Unicef agree that the situation is grim at present, the continued roll-out of anti-retroviral drugs is providing a glimmer of hope in the fight against HIV/Aids. "We are cautiously optimistic, as most Southern African infection rates have reached a plateau and ARVs are becoming increasingly available," says Engebak.