Food crisis and HIV/AIDS depriving orphans of support

The worsening food crisis in Southern Africa is leaving children orphaned by HIV/AIDS with very little support from extended families who simply have nothing extra to give.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies (IFRC) said on Monday that almost three million children in five Southern African countries have lost a mother or both parents to HIV/AIDS.

Quoting UN figures, the organisation said Zambia had nearly 900,000 orphans - 17.6 percent of the child population - and among them, two thirds have been orphaned by the disease. Seventy-seven percent of the more than one million orphans in Zimbabwe lost their parents through HIV/AIDS.

The IFRC warned that where one parent had died from AIDS, the probability that the child had already lost or would lose the other parent was relatively high.

IFRC food security coordinator for Southern Africa, Renny Nancholas, said: "The food crisis is seriously overstretching the capacity of extended families to absorb the needs of orphans and what we are seeing is families having to make a choice between feeding orphans or seeing their own children go hungry. Often it is the orphans that lose out."

The organisation launched an appeal last month for US $61.6 million to help Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland and Mozambique cope with severe food shortages. Many of their programmes are targeted at households devastated by the impact of the virus. But the IFRC said the response to their appeal had been "disappointing".

"We need to make food available to the most vulnerable households urgently," said Iain Logan, disaster operations manager for the Federation.