MAPUTO, Aug 9, 2007 (AFP) - More than 520,000 people need urgent food aid in Mozambique while 600,000 face famine between now and April next year, the disaster management agency said here on Thursday.

'The food shortages resulted from the joint effects of drought, Favio cyclone and floods which hit the country in the first quarter of 2007, and reduced by 30 percent agricultural production in the central and southern regions of Mozambique,' the director of the National Institute for the Management of Natural Disasters, Paulo Zucula, told AFP.

MAPUTO, Aug 9, 2007 (AFP) - More than 520.000 people need urgent food aid in Mozambique while 600,000 face famine between now and April next year, the disaster management agency said here on Thursday.

'The food shortages resulted from the joint effects of drought, Favio cyclone and floods which hit the country in the first quarter of 2007, and reduced by 30 percent agricultural production in the central and southern regions of Mozambique,' the director of the National Institute for the Management of Natural Disasters, Paulo Zucula, told AFP.