A senior official with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) secretariat said on Sunday most of the 16 member states of the regional bloc were facing food deficit.

Domingos Gove, SADC Secretariat director for Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources, said the situation in terms of agriculture production in the region is bad.

"We have food deficit in member states of SADC with the exception of South Africa and Zambia which have comparative stocks," he told a news conference in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam ahead of the 39th Ordinary SADC Summit of the Heads of State and Government planned for Aug. 17 and Aug. 18.

The official said rainfall situation has been bad in the entire region coupled with disasters such as cyclones that recently hit Mozambique, Malawi, Madagascar and Comoros, leaving behind unthinkable devastation.

Gove said the SADC environment vulnerability assessment committee was monitoring the situation in SADC individual member states.

"We are working with national environment vulnerability committees. It is a continuous process," said Gove in an answer to Xinhua that had inquired about the food situation in the region.

National environment vulnerability assessment committees were addressing the impacts of climate change, he added.

SADC is an organization of 16 member states established in 1980 as the Southern African Development Coordinating Conference and later in August, 1992 transformed into the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

The mission of SADC is to promote sustainable and equitable economic growth and socio-economic development through efficient, productive systems, deeper cooperation and integration, good governance and durable peace and security so that the region emerges as a competitive and effective player in international relations and the world economy.