Namibia may be hit by food crisis

Southern Africa's disastrous food crisis may spread to Namibia, as it was announced on Thursday that 70,000 people in the Caprivi region urgently needed food aid.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has already said that almost 13 million people will face food shortages in Southern Africa and so far Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia have declared a disaster.

Gabriel Kangowa, Deputy Director of the emergency management unit, in the office of President Sam Nujoma, told IRIN that assessment teams in other regions of the country will return to the capital, Windhoek, next week. Their findings will be presented to cabinet and they could seek a declaration of a disaster.

Namibia, normally a dry country, faced erratic rainfall this year and crop damage by animals and birds. In some areas like Caprivi, production could only cover 35 percent of the regional cereal needs.

Kangowa said his unit has already been in touch with the WFP representative in the country. WFP in Namibia currently only focuses on refugees but Kangowa said there would be contact with the nearby office in Luanda, Angola.

As part of the regional response to the crisis, the Southern African Development Community's (SADC) council of ministers met in Gaborone on Thursday with food security topping the agenda.

In addition to the 12,7 million people who need an estimated 1,2 million mt of cereals, a SADC statement also noted that there were other requirements like sanitation, health and education, especially for children who leave school to look for work.

The secretariat said: "It was agreed that the situation has been aggravated by poor policies on food security in the member states, poor macro-economic performance of the affected countries, [the] HIV/AIDS impact and poor coping ability."

It agreed that the WFP's support should continue and said that the WFP would probably be ready to launch an appeal in New York by the end of June.

The member states would also submit a list of requirements to the SADC secretariat within the next two weeks. These would include medium to longer-term needs such as policy strengthening and reforms, infrastructure developments and other "recovery programmes" which are beyond the funding provided by the UN agencies.

SADC member states will meet and consolidate these requirements into a draft appeal which should be approved at a meeting in Mozambique on 5 July. It recommended that a SADC appeal be launched in Geneva where ambassadors are accredited to deal with food crises.

Meanwhile World Food Summit ended in Rome on Thursday with the 183 member states of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reaffirming their political will to halve the number of hungry by 2015, but without a binding decision on how to achieve the target, AFP reported.

The summit was bogged down in controversies ranging from the developing world's battle to access US and European markets, to whether genetically modified food, an aid consignment of which was rejected by Zimbabwe, is the answer to food shortages.

Critics also slammed the cost of the meeting, saying the money could have provided food for 34,500 hungry children for a year.

But as organisations like the WFP battle donor fatique, the German foreign ministry announced that it would allocate an additional US $940,000 this year in urgent food aid for Southern Africa.