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Zim children dying of hunger
08/01/2004 19:59 - (SA)
Bulawayo - Sixty-five people, most of them children under the age of five, have died of malnutrition and other hunger-related causes in the Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo over the past five months, the city authorities said.
In a report released this week, the Bulawayo City Council said 43 people died of malnutrition between August and September last year while 22 others succumbed to hunger between October and December.
The report says the highest number of malnutrition deaths in the city, the country's second largest, were of babies and children between the age of one month and five years.
Among the dead were three adults aged between 60 and 70.
The deaths come just before expected publication by the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee, a coalition of humanitarian aid agencies, of its assessment of the food situation in urban areas.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the food situation is becoming critical in the country's urban areas, which have not been spared food shortages and drought.
Last June the WFP launched an international appeal for $197m
to feed more than five million people facing starvation in Zimbabwe but there is still a $111m shortfall.
A Market Assistance Pilot Programme launched last year by the US Agency for International Development to provide urban dwellers with cheaper sorghum meal has benefitted only some of them, the authorities say.
- AFP
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