The European Union has announced that it will immediately provide 95,000 tonnes of emergency supplies to famine-threatened Malawi.

The country is facing an immediate shortfall of 700,000 tonnes of food, which it says it needs if it is to avert widespread hunger and the deaths of up to three million people.

The BBC Africa correspondent, Rageh Omaar, says he saw field after field of dead maize during a recent visit to Malawi, during what should be the harvest season.

The United States and Britain have also pledged food aid.

'Drastic shortages'

The EU's move came as aid agency Save the Children warned that unless decisive action was taken, southern Africa faced a huge famine.

It said that up to 19 million people in six countries - from Malawi in the north of the region to Lesotho in the south - were facing drastic food shortages caused by a combination of erratic rainfall and floods followed by drought.

Malawi's maize crop has been decimated by floods and drought

In Zimbabwe, politics took a hand, with land seizures disrupting the commercial farms that normally turn in most of the food crop.

Save the Children says the region faces a food crisis on a scale that hasn't been seen for nearly 20 years, since the 1984 Ethiopian famine claimed nearly a million lives.

The United Nations World Food Programme is already trying to feed more than two and a half million people in the region, and says it is preparing for a rise in that number.

Aid agencies and donor organisations are planning to meet in South Africa next month, to discuss the needs of the region.

Meanwhile, a Southern African Development Community meeting in Swaziland concluded with a pledge by member states to find regional solutions to the problem.

"Millions of our people are going to bed on empty stomachs and as leaders we should come up with a regional policy which would help address this," Acting Swazi Prime Minister Arthur Khoza said at the end of the two-day meeting.

Proposals include the bulk buying of maize supplies.