"It rained a little ... and we ploughed the fields and planted seeds but the seedlings have since died as we havent had any more rain," headman Zakias Simombela of Iponele 3 village in the northeastern Caprivi Strip told AFP recently.

Now, he said, "We dont even have seeds to plant and there is no rain anyway. The seeds are too expensive for the farmers to afford.

"We are depending on buying mealie (maize) meal in the shops by selling some of our livestock."

UN agencies say that more than 14 million people in Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe are threatened by famine as a result of erratic weather and misguided government policies.

The agencies do not include Namibia in the list because the government is handling relief itself rather than asking for outside assistance, nor Angola, where the agencies say 1.9 million people need emergency food aid, because the crisis there is largely a result of civil war.

The UN World Food Programme is feeding 20,000 Angolan refugees in Namibia.

Sylvester Simwanza, the chief control officer of the Emergency Management Unit set up to handle the crisis, says no one has died in Namibia as a result of hunger.

He told AFP that relief food was being distributed according to plan, but ackowledged that some villagers in the Caprivi region were still going hungry due to distribution delays.

"Food was distributed to warehouses in the regions in November and it is up to the authorities there to get it to the people," he said.

"This is an ongoing programme in all 13 regions of Namibia which should last eight months."

Simwanza said the unit had distributed tens of thousands of tonnes of maize and millet meal, dried fish and cooking oil to all regions.

Drought aid in Namibia was initially delayed due to bureacratic hold-ups, and accusations flew that the food was being diverted.

The cabinet voted some 140 million Namibian dollars (close to 16 million in September for procurement of food aid, but it took two months before distribution to the warehouses began.

Most of the northern regions of Namibia are hard-hit by the drought, especially the extreme northeast, where lack of rain has led to poor harvests for the largely rural, communal farming community.

Some 81,000 people applied for drought aid in the Kavango region, and a further 27,000 in neighbouring Caprivi.

The AIDS epidemic -- more than one in five adults are infected, and 13,000 of Namibia's 1.8 million people died of AIDS last year -- is exacerbating the situation, as elsewhere in southern Africa, with hunger hitting AIDS orphans and many people too weak to work their fields or forage for wild food.

"We are still waiting for drought relief," the village headman told AFP.

"Its late. I am scared that people will start to die soon if it doesnt come.

"No one is close to death yet but we are struggling to get food."

Robert Matenzi, the deputy director of the Caprivi regional council, told AFP Wednesday his office had begun distributing food in several areas and hoped to get to the Kongola region, which includes Iponele, next week.

"We have had to do this in stages because of limited resources," he said.

"Some of our trucks are breaking down and we only have seven trucks for the whole region.

The total solar eclipse, which cut across the Kongola area on December 4, had many villagers fearful of its symbolism.

Erris Bedde, a crafter in the village of Mayuni near Choi in the Kongola area, said: "Many of us were scared that it was the end of the world, that God was coming. I also think that it was a sign that there will be no rain this year. It is bad this year. There is a lot of hunger."

Said Simombela, the headman: "I think it is a sign that we wont get any rain this season. Before we had no eclipse, and we had rain. So maybe next year we wont get any rain at all."

Abdilrahman Meygag, head of the WFP sub-office in Windhoek, told AFP Wednesday that rain had fallen over the past few days in the north, traditionally Namibia's breadbasket.

"But we'll have to see how the rains continue in December and January," he warned.

SPACE.WIRE