AIDS Crisis Could Fuel Africa Famine – U.N.

Famine in Africa could worsen unless action is taken to tackle the continent’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday.

“Unless urgent interventions are made, the epidemic could cause a steady fall in agricultural production which would fuel serious famine in African countries,” said Peter Piot, executive director of the joint United Nations program to fight HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), speaking in Ethiopia.AIDS killed up to 2.2 million Africans in 2003 and an estimated 3 million contracted HIV, bringing the number of people with HIV/AIDS in Africa to 25 million.In a report published on Tuesday, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa detailed the devastation wreaked by the disease across the world’s poorest continent.In Malawi, up to a quarter of the country’s civil servants have been killed or left seriously ill by HIV/AIDS.School teachers in Zambia are dying at a rate faster than the annual capacity of teacher training colleges.In South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, about 68,000 of the 75,000 teachers will be lost from the system by 2010 due to AIDS and staff taking jobs outside the area.In Kenya about 75 percent of deaths in the police force are linked to AIDS, the report said.In northern Zambia, which is relatively free from drought, the disease has severely undermined food production. (Source: Reuters, Oct 2004)