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UN says Southern African suffering 'AIDS famine'
( 2002-09-29 15:07 ) (7 )

The United Nations renewed its appeal Thursday for immediate food and relief supplies to save the lives of millions of people in sub-Saharan African facing death from starvation and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Shocked by the horrors caused by the disease and the continuing famine in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, senior U.N. officials who recently returned from the region say over 14 million people risk starving.

''The crisis is accelerating at a much faster pace than we had anticipated,'' James Morris, head of the World Food Program (WFP) told journalists at a news briefing. ''There is a crisis within the crisis. The HIV/AIDS crisis is enormous.''

The United Nations is urging industrialized countries and donors to come up with 611 million dollars for food and other life-sustaining support. Currently, officials say, they have only 40 percent of what they need for food.

The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) says that today more than 28 million people in the region - most of them youth - are living with HIV/AIDS.

In July, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated 300,000 people would die in the area by the end of the year.

Officials say the spread of AIDS is a leading factor in the decline in agricultural production, as the disease has infected millions of farmers.

Millions of people are now forced to eat seed grain that should be used for planting, a cause of malnutrition that leaves them vulnerable to disease.

''This is an AIDS induced famine,'' Stephen Lewis, the U.N. secretary general's special envoy in Africa told an international gathering of women on Wednesday. ''There are no women left to till the land.''

The WFP chief agrees. ''Millions of children are condemned to head their household because their parents and grandparents have died,'' said Morris, who recently returned from the region.

The devastation has left behind over four million orphans in the region, dramatically changing life in the six countries, particularly in the area of education.

Lewis, a Canadian national who spent several years in Africa, points out that more than a million children have lost their teachers to AIDS, a phenomenon that accelerates the declining rates of primary education.

When education is available, it is increasingly out of reach for poor families because of tuition charges introduced by many governments as a condition to receive loans under the World Bank's structural adjust program.

Both Morris and Lewis said AIDS infections have disproportionately hit young women between the age of 15 and 24.

The latest UNAIDS figures show that six million of the nearly nine million young people living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are women.

Last year, a study by U.S.-based Johns Hopkins University warned that infections would continue to spread to younger age groups as men choose increasingly younger partners.

Millions of young women lack information and knowledge about HIV/AIDS and how to prevent it, while they remain vulnerable to rape and forcible marriages to older men infected with the disease.

''AIDS has a woman's face in sub-Saharan Africa,'' says Lewis who says gender inequality is a fundamental reason for the AIDS epidemic. ''There is a need for an unbridled campaign for gender equality,'' he adds.

''The U.N. itself has to monitor this campaign in Africa and elsewhere in the world.''

Last year, Secretary General Kofi Annan established a global fund for AIDS and other deadly diseases and asked governments and international donors to pledge 10 billion dollars to fund it. Till now, the U.N. has received a little more than two billion dollars.

''It's a moral lapse,'' says Lewis. ''When three thousand people died on Sep. 11, the world raised 100 billion dollars. Last year two million people died in Africa,'' he continued. ''There is something wrong here.''