Harvests improve in sub-Saharan Africa but millions still need food aid, UN says

Food harvests have improved in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, but well over 10 million people in 24 of the nearly 50 countries are still facing food emergencies, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says in its first report of the year on the region.

Good crops in Ethiopia and Sudan have improved East Africa's food production, but "the food situation in parts of Somalia, Eritrea, Tanzania and pastoral areas of Kenya is of particular concern," FAO says.

The number of East Africans likely to be in need include 123,000 in Somalia, 1.9 million in Eritrea, 7 million in Ethiopia and 1 million in Kenya, as well as unspecified numbers in Tanzania and strife-torn northern Uganda, it says.

Sudan produced a record cereal crop in 2003-2004 that was 63 per cent higher than last year's harvest, but the civil conflict in the Darfur region displaced more than a million people, forcing them to abandon their last crops, FAO says.

Flooding in Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe and cyclones in Madagascar substantially damaged crops, while HIV/AIDS has reduced the number of farmers across southern Africa, it says.

In Zimbabwe, where some 5.5 million vulnerable people have limited access to food, "agriculture is severely handicapped by the lack of tillage capacity, due to extremely low numbers of tractors and lack of fuel and spare parts."

The 24 countries facing food emergencies are Angola, Burundi, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Republic of Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.