Southern African nations are discussing setting up strategic grain reserves to tackle food shortages that some experts say are becoming endemic within the region, officials said yesterday. At a meeting of the South African Development Community (SADC) in Malawi’s capital Lilongwe, officials said the lack of a strategic reserve prevents countries with food shortages from benefiting from surpluses nearby.

“The potential for development in Southern Africa is enormous. The SADC region can be the storehouse of food enough for food deficit regions to turn to,” said Susan Sikaneta, executive secretary of the African Union Southern Africa Regional Office. The United Nations World Food Programme says almost two million people in Lesotho, Malawi and Swaziland will need food in the first half of 2005. In 2002, 14 million across the region faced hunger after poor rains, and now aid agencies say ongoing shortages have left many people finding it difficult to cope.

Countries in the region have some of the highest rates of HIV-AIDS in the world, and experts say the disease has been killing farm workers and preventing them from passing on key agricultural knowledge to the next generation. Despite its recent history of severe food shortages, southern Africa has several grain exporting countries including Zambia and South Africa.

Zimbabwe’s government has also said it expects a bumper crop this year, although farmers and international grain analysts have cast doubt on that projection. Sikaneta said the African Union and its partners had been trying to increase agricultural production through irrigation farming, among other measures, and these were beginning to have an effect.

“We know for sure that our region is not poor. The region is potentially rich,” she said. “We have every reason to feel confident that the region will sooner than later start experiencing good harvests, with surplus for sale.” The Lilongwe meeting follows the February 2004 Sirte Declaration, which called on Africa’s leaders to ensure food security and eliminate hunger and poverty at both household and national levels by 2015.

<B>Denis Mzembe</B>