Still gripped by poverty, AIDS, erratic weather - WFP

The costs of funerals and medicines are contributing to southern Africa's dire food situation, with three million people facing shortages, the World Food Programme (WFP) said. Despite harvests improving in southern Africa, the effects of poverty and erratic weather conditions were compounded by the most vulnerable people having to battle HIV/AIDS, said the WFP's latest national food security and vulnerability report. Southern Africa has the world's highest incidence of the disease. According to WFP spokesperson Patricia Lucas, "The poor's assets are being used to cover the costs of medicines and funerals," taking already meagre resources for seeds and equipment from poor households surviving on subsistence agriculture. In many cases these households were still recovering from the erratic weather conditions of the past few years, which had trapped them in a cycle of extreme poverty. Uneven rain distribution in Swaziland brought cereal production down to 81,000 tonnes, about 114,000 tonnes short of the tiny kingdom's consumption requirement, WFP said. The country has been a net importer of food since independence in 1968, and has never achieved food production of more than 49 percent of its annual consumption requirement. Over 40 percent of the sexually active adult population is HIV-positive, and the pandemic's effect was also preventing the transfer of agricultural skills from one generation to the next. The WFP's Junior Farmer Field and Life School, which began in Swaziland this year, aims to equip children as young as 12 years with the necessary agricultural skills for food production. With the number of HIV/AIDS orphans and child-headed families increasing, the initiative aimed to fill the skills gap left by the premature death of parents. Lucas said five pilot projects with 25 students each were "proving very successful". The junior farmer project is also running in Malawi, Mozambique and Namibia. In Angola there was at least a US$5 million donor shortage of funds, which was "threatening a complete suspension of food distributions". WFP had already instituted a system of half-rationing in some areas, and about 800,000 people would require food or non-food assistance until at least the next harvest in May 2007. Four years of peace in the oil- and diamond-rich nation have yet to overcome the legacy of three decades of civil war. Poor infrastructure and uncleared minefields complicated food assistance operations, with expensive air transport still being used to support some communities. Peace has led to an increase in prospecting by diamond and oil companies, bringing an improvement in infrastructure to some areas, where companies built road networks to improve access to their operations.