Southern Africa faces a looming food crisis as it is not producing enough to feed its people - although it has sufficient land and natural resources to do so.
Unless there is decisive action, the region will be unable to meet the global target, set by the Millennium Summit in 2000, of halving the number of hungry people by 2015.
This is one of the sobering findings of a four-year study released this week by the Southern African Millennium Assessment which involved hundreds of social and natural scientists from throughout the region.
The report, Ecosystem Services in Southern Africa, is edited by Bob Scholes and R Biggs of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria.
The purpose of the report was to assess the capacity of ecosystems in southern Africa to support human well-being. It examined selected ecosystems in 19 African countries south of the equator.
It is part of the international Millennium Project launched to recommend the best strategies for achieving the global agenda of Millennium Development Goals. These include eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development.
The report stressed that all life depended on healthy ecosystems which provided our basic needs of food, water and air. Ecosystems also provided essential services, such as flood and disease control and nutrient cycling.
The food insecurity in southern Africa had more to do with lack of access to food, rather than inadequate food production. This was caused by a range of regional and global and political and economic factors, and the result was that up to 25 percent of the population was undernourished. There had been a downward trend in the amount of protein produced per capita in the last 25 years, which was now below the recommended minimum.
Climate change, with its predicted average world temperature increase of between two and 5°C by 2050, would have serious consequences for agricultural production.
HIV and Aids would worsen our future food security because it will reduce the agricultural labour force, reduce household income through loss of earners, interfere with the transfer of knowledge and education and put pressure on household food resources because of Aids orphans.
The report also examined the region's air quality, energy from natural resources, biodiversity and fresh water supplies. It sketched two scenarios, spanning the next 30 years: a "patchwork" future of slow economic growth, marginalisation from the global economy and weak governance; and a "partnership" future where effective national governments are established in most countries and there was a high degree of regional co-operation.
"Viewed at the regional scale, southern Africa is in a declining, but not yet irrecoverable state with respect to ecosystem services," the report says.
But without adequate ecosystem protection and management and without focused intervention, localised problems could spread and "coalesce into a general syndrome of ecosystem service failure".
Report available at www.millenniumassessment.org.