AIDS Adds to African Food Crisis

As Southern Africa struggles with its worst food crisis in at least a decade -- some 8 million people currently need emergency food aid -- relief workers say AIDS has added greatly to the problem. The loss of laborers and resources to AIDS has pushed many families to the edge of survival.

"Everyone believed that this [AIDS] epidemic was [just] a health issue. It's only later that we realized that it impacted every single sector of development," says Marcela Villarreal, chief of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) population and development service. "Food security is obviously the highest issue on rural people's agendas because they have to eat... every day. Because they are impoverished and because they have HIV/AIDS, they are losing their ability to deal with this most basic of needs."

More than two-thirds of the population in the 25 most affected African countries live in rural areas. In Malawi, for example, one of the region's poorest countries and one of those hardest hit by the current food crisis, some 80 percent of people make their living off the land.

Delegates are meeting in Rome this week for the UN World Food Summit. By 2015, the UN hopes to cut in half the 800 million people who currently do not have enough to eat. So severe is the crisis in some communities that FAO has begun to consider heavily stricken AIDS communities disaster areas.

"Given that subsistence agriculture is by definition only at the subsistence level, the loss of a working adult is a major impact on agricultural production and often has broader implications for the community," says Chris Desmond, a researcher at the Health, Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at the University of Natal in South Africa. "Also, with sickness, you often have extreme pressure on household resources. This can result in the sale of assets, which can often be the sale of very key assets that diminish the ability to produce."

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