By Steve Swindells
The drought-induced food crisis across southern Africa has again highlighted the deadly impact that HIV/AIDS is having on food security in the region. The disease has already killed about seven million farm workers since 1985 in the 25 worst-hit African countries, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, and UNAIDS fears another 16 million may die over the next 20 years unless access to treatment is improved and prevention responses are swiftly implemented.
"Again and again, we at the World Food Program (WFP) are struck by the fact that one of the first things impoverished HIV/AIDS sufferers ask for is food. Not medicine, but plain, simple food," WFP executive director James Morris told AlertNet.
"(AIDS) has had a disastrous impact on food production. Fewer working farmers means less food. Weakened, HIV-positive farmers are less productive and less capable of earning off-farm income…for fertilizers and other farm inputs."
The WFP's emergency operations in southern Africa have been hit by serious commodity shortfalls in February and March.
"Ongoing commodity shortfalls during the 'hunger period' before the April-May harvest are exacerbating household food insecurity for over 6.5 million people," the WFP said in its latest update on the region.
As people fall sick due to HIV/AIDS, less land is cultivated and they turn to less labour-intensive and less nutritious crops such as cassava instead of maize. They also opt for a narrower crop mix, while livestock production declines. Food production has been found to drop by 40 per cent in households affected by HIV/AIDS as farmers and their families fall sick.
FROM SHORTAGES TO CRISIS
Planting of cash crops, which in normal times can provide a financial safety net to rural areas, are all at risk as illness strikes a household.
"For many rural households in these countries, AIDS has turned what used to be a food shortage into a food crisis," UNAIDS chief Peter Piot said.
Decreases in areas planted, declines in crop yields, changes in cropping patterns and loss of agricultural knowledge have all been documented by U.N. agencies as family or other carers spend more time tending to the sick.
UNAIDS has identified the two-way link between HIV/AIDS and food security across southern Africa and estimates that Sub-Sahara Africa is the epicenter of the global AIDS epidemic, with 26.6 million people living with the disease in 2003. In several countries, 60 to 70 percent of farms have suffered labour losses as a result of HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS says. The FAO has also highlighted the problems facing children who have lost their parents before learning how to farm, prepare food or fend for themselves.
AIDS has already orphaned more than 11 million African children, half of whom are between the ages of 10 and 14, according to UNICEF, which fears that more than one in five children in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe will be orphaned by 2010.
Extended families were caring for 90 percent of all orphans. Overstressed and in many cases already overwhelmed, these networks will face ever-greater burdens as the number of orphans continues to spiral upward, the U.N. children's body warned in a report last November.
Even host governments' ability to respond to the food crisis is being blunted by AIDS. At Kenya's Ministry of Agriculture, for example, more then half of staff deaths in the last five years were caused by AIDS, according to the FAO. There are real fears of a labour shortage in some parts of the region.
LOST LABOUR
The regional 14-member Southern African Development Community says HIV/AIDS has significantly increased the vulnerability of households to acute food insecurity with a decline in quantity and quality of labour available for farming.
"High rates of HIV/AIDS infection exacerbate and are exacerbated by the current food shortages (in the SADC region)," the regional body concluded. "Implications for longer-term livelihood and food security are grim."
An assessment in Zambia showed that households in which the head was chronically ill planted up to 53 percent less area than households without a chronically ill person, according to UNAIDS.
UNAIDS has also shown that food shortages are driving more women and girls to prostitution, whether for cash or for food, in the six countries of southern Africa affected by the crisis – Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique and Malawi.
The most vulnerable households to food insecurity were typically those headed by women or orphans, and those with little or no livestock and a limited land holding. Reports drawn up for USAID also show that because AIDS kills young adults in their prime productive years, the agricultural sector – particularly small-holders whose production depends heavily on labour -- is especially hard-hit.
The WFP is trying to fight the crisis by distributing highly nutritious rations to people with HIV. "Good nutrition helps people resist infection, which is even more important for HIV-positive individuals who are vulnerable to opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis," the WFP's Morris said.
"By providing food to the victims of this crisis, including special highly nutritious rations to HIV/AIDS sufferers, we can make an enormous difference."
