By Edward Harris
Dakar - From locust-devastated western dust bowls to the conflict-ridden central jungles and the plains of the Aids-struck south, hunger pangs are growing among Africa's most vulnerable, and relief officials say they're increasingly unable to help.
Much of the world's poorest continent is entering its annual "lean season" - the months leading up to harvest when food stores dwindle and bellies gurgle among the most impoverished. Calls for international assistance are multiplying, but funding shortfalls and endemic strife are hitting efforts by humanitarian workers to respond.
"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 spokesperson for the United Nations' World Food Programme, which spearheads food-distribution efforts - but is suffering serious funding shortfalls.
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'We are going to see a terrible situation getting worse' "People are slipping away in the dusty villages of Malawi or Sudan, or wherever," she said from the agency's headquarters in Rome. "We need to sound the alarm now."
While the great majority of sub-Saharan Africans have plenty to eat and now 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 workers say the plight of Africa's hungry has been overshadowed by the massive aid outpouring after the Asian tsunami - a phenomenon known as "donor fatigue".
And since there is no African famine raging, pictures of skeletal, dying babies aren't arriving in morning newspapers or on evening news programmes, they say.
But the needy are there - one in three sub-Saharan Africans don't get enough nourishment each day, the UN says.
'You can't build roads on an empty stomach' In Central Africa's Uganda, the UN made an urgent appeal on Wednesday for food worth $45-million to help more than three million Ugandans, half of them victims of a 19-year civil war.
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