By Muchena Zigomo JOHANNESBURG, Jan 23 (Reuters) - The U.N's World Food Programme needs to secure food aid for about 6.5 million people in southern Africa by April, the bulk of them in Zimbabwe where the humanitarian situation has worsened, a WFP official said on Friday. Zimbabwe alone has about 5.5 million people needing food aid and is also battling a cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 2,500 people in Africa's worst outbreak in almost a decade. The early part of the year is usually the peak hunger season in southern Africa, falling just before the start of the harvest season in April. Poor crops, dwindling food supplies and a shortfall in funding have made the situation worse, WFP said. WFP's southern Africa spokesman Richard Lee said the agency would target people living with HIV/AIDS, orphans and children in school feeding programmes among others. "January, February, March every year is the hungriest time of the year in southern Africa because our main annual harvest ... starts coming in around April," Lee said. "So these three months are always the hardest because there are so many very poor, very vulnerable people in this region, and this is always the period when the most people struggle to find food for themselves and for their families. Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic has compounded the humanitarian crisis in the country, where critics say President Robert Mugabe's policies, such as the seizure of white-owned farms, have ruined Zimbabwe's economy. But the 84-year-old ruler, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, blames Western sanctions for the crisis. "We have an enormous operation at the moment going on in Zimbabwe where we're aiming to provide assistance to 4.5 million people in Zimbabwe in January," Lee said. More than a million others in Zimbabwe would be fed by a group of three U.S. sponsored non-governmental organisations. Funding shortages may hamper some of the WFP's regional operations and could force it to cut aid rations. The U.N. agency said last week it was $65 million short of the $140 million it needs for emergency food for Zimbabwe. It was another $8.5 million short of needs for its programmes in Mozambique -- where about 350,000 people need food aid because of poor harvests caused by drought and floods. (Editing by James Macharia and Katie Nguyen)
A cleaver lies on the stomach of freshly slaughtered cow outside Husam Nasr's butcher shop in Gaza January 22, 2009. Nasr said he would have been able to sell the meat ...
