Food aid remains significant for food availability in many low-income countries in southern Africa. The food crisis has worsened in the region due to low growth, drought, floods and increasing population.
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) on Thursday, said “a record 45 million people in Southern Africa, mostly women and children, face severe food insecurity caused by drought, flooding, and economic disarray.”
“This hunger crisis is on a scale we’ve not seen before and the evidence shows it’s going to get worse,” said Lola Castro, WFP regional director for Southern Africa, in a statement.
With temperatures rising at twice the global average and most of its food produced by subsistence farmers entirely dependent on increasingly unreliable rains, Southern Africa has had just one normal growing season in the last five years, WFP said.
“If we don’t receive the necessary funding, we’ll have no choice but to assist fewer of those most in need, and with less,” Castro said.
The UN agency is the leading humanitarian organization saving lives and changing lives, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience.
World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that it secured only $205m of the $489m it requires, saying families across the region were already skipping meals, taking children out of school, selling off precious assets, and falling into debt to stave off agricultural losses.
The agency plans to provide “lean season” assistance to 8.3 million people grappling with “crisis” or “emergency” levels of hunger in eight of the hardest-hit countries, which include Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Madagascar, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini and Malawi.
The World Food Programme (WFP) is the UN agency tasked with addressing hunger-related emergencies. Assisting 86.7 million people in around 83 countries each year.
The cycle of hunger
The dry conditions will be at their most severe in Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Zambia and Zimbabwe, with slightly better crop-growing conditions forecast for Mozambique and South Africa, report said.
Southern Africa is forecast to receive below-average rainfall from December till March, exacerbating the need for food assistance after a severe drought in the previous season caused livestock deaths and crop failures, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
In December, the United Nations said it was procuring food assistance for 4.1 million Zimbabweans, a quarter of the population of a country where shortages are being exacerbated by runaway inflation and climate-induced drought.
Susafrica.com Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world.
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