Patrick Laurence reports from Johannesburg on the efforts of the international humanitarian organisations to stave off an impending catastrophe'
The lives of 13 million people in Southern Africa are at risk as the World Food Programme (WFP), its sister United Nations agencies and international humanitarian organisations strive to ensure that sufficient food is brought in to avert disaster.
One million tons of food, valued at more than $500 million, is needed between now and March next year if the threat of starvation on an appalling scale is to be staved off. So far, however, barely more than one-fifth of the required food has been secured.
Judith Lewis, WFP regional director for South and East Africa, spells out these bleak facts in an interview in the UN agency's Johannesburg office. Accommodating 20 international staff members and 40 locally recruited staff, the office serves as a co-ordinating centre for the relief programme.
While local newspapers talk of the spectre of famine and starvation, Ms Lewis shies away from those terms. She prefers to talk of a "food crisis". But there is no doubt that the crisis is acute. The executive director of the WFP, James Morris, has spoken of "people walking a thin tightrope between life and death" and warns of an impending "catastrophe" unless there is prompt and effective intervention to assist the hungry people.
In numerical terms, the epicentre of the food crisis is Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Nearly half of the people threatened by the crisis - many of them already exist on one meal a day - are in Zimbabwe. But Ms Lewis thinks that the situation at present is probably worse on the ground for the hungry people in Zimbabwe's northern neighbours, Zambia and Malawi, although there are fewer of them.
The crisis spreads far beyond those three countries, however. It reaches eastwards into Angola (where the end of decades of civil strife has revealed terrible poverty and hunger in areas once occupied by rebel Unita fighters), westwards into Mozambique and southwards into Swaziland and Mozambique.
South Africa is an exception, though even it contains squatter settlements and rural villages where the apocalyptic horsemen of hunger and pestilence (in the form of HIV-AIDS) are seldom far from the door.
The present Southern African food crisis - which, according to media reports in South Africa, has triggered the "largest appeal for humanitarian aid by the Red Cross since the war in the Balkans in the early 1990s" - is not the first in the region. It finds a parallel in the crisis which swept across large tracts of Southern African in 1992.
But Ms Lewis reckons that the 1992 crisis and the present one are very different. She states that the 1992 crisis was one which could be summed up in three words: "drought, drought and drought". The present crisis, however, is due to a "combination of factors", of which drought is one. Drought aside - and that is certainly an important cause of the crisis - she identifies the additional factors as widespread poverty (several of the African countries are among the poorest in the world), chronic malnutrition and, of course, HIV-AIDS (sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence of HIV-AIDS in the world, according to UNAIDS).
But there is another important factor which the WFP refers to tactfully as "misgovernment", "policy failures" and "mismanagement". A less diplomatic description of the same problem would be administrative incompetence, governmental negligence and, in the case of Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu-PF government, political manoeuvring worthy of Niccolo Machiavelli.
Political culpability of governments is most manifest in Zimbabwe. There, Robert Mugabe's government, seeking to reverse the flow of support to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), expropriated farms from productive (white) farmers and gave them to "war veterans" with little knowledge of, or interest in, farming or to Zanu-PF barons, whose greed was not matched by agricultural skills.
Continuing reports that the Mugabe government is loath to distribute emergency food aid to MDC supporters aggravate the situation, although Mugabe's government occasionally relents when its political partisanship is exposed.
Mugabe himself blames the food shortages on the drought (which, as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has noted, is particularly severe) and on Britain. Ms Lewis says, however, that lack of water is not the issue in Zimbabwe. She is aware that in better days Zimbabwe's agricultural planners built dams to provide for irrigation farming and to cope with drought.
In Malawi, the government sold off the grain reserves which provided a "viable safety net". Debate continues over why it did so. Fingers have been pointed at the International Monetary Fund for reportedly advising the government to do so. The IMF denies that it advised the government to sell off all its grain reserves. But, as Oxfam has pointedly observed, an underlying question remains: what happened to the money obtained from the sale?
In Zambia, there are suspicions that millions of dollars, much of it donor money, were siphoned off for personal enrichment of highly-placed officials during the two-term presidency of Frederick Chiluba.
In Swaziland, the young monarch, Mswati III, is under fire for buying an expensive jet aircraft for his exclusive use when his subjects are starving.
In Lesotho, one the poorest countries in the world, the government cannot avoid all responsibility for, to quote USAID, "poor soil management which had led to serious environmental degradation".
Both of these small countries have been adversely affected by the downturn in South Africa's economy, Ms Lewis observes. However, she speaks appreciatively of the co-operation she has received from the Southern African Development Community, to which all the affected countries belong, and of the help given by the South African government and its disaster management team.
Without understating the gravity of the situation, she remains hopeful that the appeals for help are being increasingly heeded.