World's impoverished face 'lean season'

DAKAR, Senegal — From Africa's locust-devastated western dust bowls to the conflict-ridden central jungles and the AIDS-struck south, aid officials calling for urgent hunger relief say a lack of money is making it increasingly difficult to help the continent's most vulnerable.

Much of the world's poorest continent is entering its annual "lean season" — the months leading up to harvest when food stores dwindle and hunger worsens among the most impoverished.

"We're hungry, help us," read signs carried by hundreds who marched Wednesday in Niger's capital, Niamey, demanding free food. The country has been hit by drought and locusts.

The U.N. World Food Program has made urgent appeals this year for food aid to Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. In Zimbabwe, the United Nations now estimates more than 5.5 million people will need emergency food aid before the next harvest.

But funding shortfalls and endemic strife are hampering humanitarian efforts.

"Essentially, we are really concerned because of drought, lack of harvest, civil war, or insecurity in general: it all comes down to a deadly cocktail of need," said Caroline Hurford, a spokeswoman for the U.N.'s World Food Program, which is suffering serious funding shortfalls.

"People are slipping away in the dusty villages of Malawi or Sudan," she said from the agency's headquarters in Rome. "We need to sound the alarm now."

While the majority of sub-Saharan Africans have plenty to eat and live in democracies where famine is all but unheard of, those inhabiting conflict zones, harsh climes or hard-to-reach areas are increasingly going hungry, aid officials say.

"I used to have a good garden in my home before I was displaced," said Betty Acan, 32, a married mother of three who is staying with her family at the Lapai Nak refugee camp a few miles outside Gulu in Uganda's restive southeast. "I used to sell some of the crop produce, especially beans and chicken, from my farm and earned school fees for my children. Now I am no more."

She said the family lives on corn, beans and cooking oil provided by the World Food Program.

A refugee at a different camp near Gulu, Martin Odongo, said his family of nine also survives on WFP handouts.

"I cannot cultivate food anywhere because if we venture out, we can be killed by the rebels," said Odongo, 45.