400,000 Lesothans, 1.2-million Zambians, 2-m Zimbabweans need urgent food aid - right now
- but South Africa's farmers no longer produce enough:
July 20 2007 -- The southern African kingdom of Lesotho has declared a state of emergency today -- appealing for international help to feed more than 400,000 desperately hungry people. And in Zambia, more than 1.2-million people also need urgent food-aid, even though the country has more than 150,000 subsistence farmers and is lush and green from recent rainfall. Moreover, 8,000 Zimbabweans a day are now fleeing from their own man made-famine-struck country into neighbouring South Africa -- making massive demands on that country's own diminishing food supplies.
VIEW THE FAO hunger map of southern Africa:
http://www.fao.org/es/ess/faostat/foodsecurity/FSMap/map14.htmMaize production has collapsed by more than 40% in Lesotho and Zambia this past season -- while in Zimbabwe, only 10% of the normal annual grain crop was raised. The World Food Programme warns that food-aid must be rushed urgently to all three countries.
Killer TB+Aids: one-quarter of southern African population infected:
In all three countries - as in all of southern Africa -- more than one-quarter of the working-age population is now infected with the combined deadly epidemics of Tuberculosis+Aids, meaning that the number of people able to tend their many tens of thousands of small subsistence-fields has dropped as they are dying, while the number of orphans needing emergency food-aid has also risen dramatically.
The average life expectancy for black African adults in all the southern African countries including South Africa has now dropped to below 32 years.
For the past six months, subsistence-farm families throughout southern Africa have known that things were getting very bad, with massive appeals for emergency help received at local religious charities all over the sub-continent. The new assessments by local and international institutions have now confirmed their worst fears.
The World Food Programme estimates that the cereal harvests in Lesotho and Zambia now are less than a quarter of what the countries need to feed themselves. Lesotho's prime minister Pakalitha Mosisili has declared a state of emergency only today.
Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, where the prices of the few available foods in shops have soared by more than 9,500% since Janaury, the food-aid organisation CARE reports on January 19 2007 that Mugabe's police have now looted all the foreign food-aid supplies which ahd been awaiting distribution to tens of thousands of starving villagers. Yet the USA president George Bush is still sending emergency food-aid directly to this regime. He should be sending it to the South African side of the Zimbabwean border to help feed those thousands of starving refugees. However even the Red Cross hasn't done so, and neither has it set up any refugee camps for these poor people.
All these southern-African countries used to import excess-food produced by its neighbour South Africa -- now the only remaining excess-food producer in the entire region. However, South Africa 's food-prices have tripled since January as its own supplies are dwindling rapidly. This is mainly due to the Mbeki-regime's own ongoing ethnic-cleansing campaign to decimate its 'white'(Afrikaner-) agricultural sector and replace them with hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers, South Africa now also produces less than 50% of its production ten years ago. Indeed its remaining 40,000 professional farmers now are no longer able to produce enough food to feed its own 47-million-strong population and have been issuing warnings to this effect for the past two years.
LINKS:
Transvaal Agricultural Union warns of food shortages in SA:
http://www.tlu.co.zaThe Great South African Land Scandal:
http://www.africancrisis.org/images%5CLandScandalIndex.pdfSA going the Zim-way - Agri-SA warns:
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http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_1395059,00.html -
http://www.avocado.co.za/new/pages/AgriSANewsRelease19012007.doc400,000 Lesotho residents need urgent food aid, July 20 2007:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6906923.stm1,2-m Zambians need food-aid, July 20 2007:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4678592.stmUS sends 47 400 tons of food-aid to Zimbabwe, July 18 2007
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=84&art_id=nw20070717215233855C149747Zimbabwe, a country in dispair:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/A14061313Agricultural trends in southern Africa 1989-1991 - statistics:
http://earthtrends.wri.org/text/agriculture-food/country-profile-129.htmlCattle-density in southern Africa 2000: map:
http://earthtrends.wri.org/text/map_lg.php?mid=2461,2-m Zambians need food-aid
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4678592.stmZimbabwe, a country in dispair:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/A14061313