PENDLE MP Gordon Prentice has called for help for African Aids victims after seeing the consequences of the disease during a visit to South Africa.

He was told during his visit to Botswana and Namibia that more than one third of all sexually active adults are infected with the virus and the new drugs which can control the disease are simply not available.

He said: "I visited one shanty town outside Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, where the cemetery was full up before the local authority had finished building it. I spoke to women in a co-operative town where they were turning old newspaper in to papier mache coffins for the children. I found it very distressing.

Mr Prentice, who was travelling with a small group of MPs, said drought was another major problem with huge tracts of the country turned to desert.

He said: "You can fly for a couple of hours and see the same unchanging arid earth below. The desert amounts to areas the size of France and there's a real possibility that water, or the absence of it, is likely to become the source of regional instability in the future as water is diverted from rivers in the north close to Angola to supply the fast growing towns in the south."