By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS, March 29 (Reuters) - More people will starve in Zimbabwe this year with its maize harvest forecast to fall two-thirds short of what is needed, a U.N. humanitarian director told the U.N. Security Council on Thursday.

Rashid Khalikov, director of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said the country needed 1.8 million tonnes of maize, but only 600,000 metric tonnes was forecast to be harvested.

"The government insists it will not ask for external food assistance because it has the capacity to feed its own people," he said. "The government has not yet shared with the United Nations any information on how the remaining gap will be met.

"We expect a significant increase in food-insecure people in 2007," Khalikov told the council, adding that in 2006 there were 1.4 million people who were "food insecure" in rural areas and a large, unconfirmed number in urban areas.

Britain requested the briefing on Zimbabwe after President Robert Mugabe -- long criticized for violently cracking down on opponents -- suppressed a March 11 protest rally. Scores of opponents were detained and then showed signs of being beaten.

Then on Wednesday police stormed the main opposition party headquarter and arrested its leader and other politicians.

Britain's U.N. Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said that while the statistics given by Khalikov showed the situation in Zimbabwe was acute, it was important "to send a very clear message of our concern for the plight of the Zimbabwe people."

He told reporters he hoped a meeting of southern African heads of state on Thursday would "actually bring some contribution to actually tackle the fundamental problems." He did not elaborate on those problems.

But the special summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) instead urged the West to drop sanctions against Mugabe's government and suggested dialogue -- led by South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki -- as the solution to Zimbabwe's political crisis.

Mugabe, 83, Zimbabwe's sole ruler since independence from Britain in 1980, has traded on his legacy as a leading light in Africa's anti-colonial struggle and says he is the victim of Western sabotage for his policy of seizing white-owned farms to distribute to landless blacks.

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