MORRIS CARPENTER/PANOS for TIME

WHEN WILL THERE BE A HARVEST?: Farmers are helpless as their crops wither in the fields

Scarred
	War, bad government and AIDS are feeding a deadly drought across southern Africa
	By SIMON ROBINSON/Siavonga

Posted Sunday, Jul. 28, 2002; 11:45 a.m. BST
Loveness Mudaala has the face of a teenager and the hands of a 60-year-old. She is, in fact, 43 and the mother of 18 children. They are not all hers by birth, but like many mothers across southern Africa she has taken in nephews and nieces as her own brothers and sisters have died — nine so far, leaving 12 orphans — of a disease that, says Mudaala, "I will not mention because it may cause problems." Mudaala, who lives in the Siavonga district of southern Zambia, has seen drought before, but the disease she will not name — aids — and the children it left behind are sapping her ability to cope with the worst dry spell to hit the region in a decade.

The patch of land behind her tiny tin-roofed hut is littered with the shriveled stalks of dead sorghum and maize plants. For the past three months she has sent her children into a nearby forest to collect berries and nuts, which she boils for days to get rid of their poisons and then feeds to her family. She needs help, she says, and the food aid — a bucket of maize that lasts a family of six just three days — distributed once a month at the local primary school goes first to the village's eldest and most vulnerable, so she usually misses out. "If there is nothing, there is nothing," she says. "God makes a tough life."

	"If this drought is not to turn into a famine, people have to start to make a committment — Brenda Cupper, CARE International

Mudaala is one of more than 13 million people across southern Africa who are the victims not just of bad weather but of a savage confluence of erratic climate, bad governance and worse economic policies, war and, most brutally, the aids pandemic. The crisis is not yet a famine, according to the United Nations World Food Program, which is coordinating the relief effort, but it is heading that way. And without help, people will soon start dying. "We're at the point of no return," says Brenda Cupper, Zambian country director for the aid agency care International, which is distributing food in three of Zambia's worst-hit districts. "If this drought is not to turn into a famine, people have to start to make a commitment."

How did one of the richest and most fertile regions on the continent come to this? Droughts occur regularly in southern Africa. The last big one was in 1992, when more than 18 million people needed feeding. But this year's drought, following one and in some places two years of failed crops, has been exacerbated by human folly. In Angola, a 27-year civil war has forced millions off their land, destroyed infrastructure and left huge swaths of the country off-limits for farming. A cease-fire signed nearly four months ago offers the chance for a new beginning, but it will take years before the country recovers. Malawi aggravated its food shortage last year by selling, at a loss, its entire Strategic Grain Reserve, an emergency store of food built up in case of dry spells. Malawi says it was an "honest mistake" and blames in part poor advice from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. The IMF says it advised selling only part of the store and notes that Malawi did not retain even the minimum amount required by its own policy.

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Who should solve the southern Africa drought problem? African governments N.G.O.s Individuals (via charities) Foreign governments It will never be solved