THE FAMINE: EMERGENCY IS STILL THERE : No, Virginia, the famine in Africa isn’t over.

According to projections released last week by the United Nations Office of Emergency Operations in Africa, about 19 million will continue to get sick, starve and thirst in 1986.

The worst fear stated by relief officials is that the shifting focus of both the media and rock charities like USA for Africa from the African famine to America’s homeless could obliterate progress that has been made in places like Ethiopia during the past year.

“I have a certain apprehension, yes,” said UNICEF special projects director Peter Hansen of USA for Africa’s upcoming Hands Across America project and other show business efforts springing up this winter to help hungry Americans.

While domestic hunger programs are laudable, Hansen said, he openly fears that “beating the emergency drum is going to make us face compassion fatigue. . . . People are going to start turning off to a picture of a dying child.”

Hansen is not alone in his apprehensions. Officials with agencies like the International Red Cross and the U.N. High Commission on Refugees also are anxious. UNHCR representative Nicholas Van Praag made a pilgrimage to Hollywood last week specifically to encourage Ken Kragen and USA for Africa officials not to shun Africa now that they have turned the spotlight on America’s poor.

“People who do not see the daily statistics will see USA for Africa, Live Aid and Band Aid saying that things are getting better. And they are,” Hansen said. “But it is not over.”

The recurring dread among veteran relief officials like Hansen and Van Praag is that high levels of high profile, celebrity-studded concentration on the hunger issue could cause a public backlash and actually reduce anti-famine giving.

“What happens is that there is such a level of anxiety created with this emergency aura that, a year down the line, there is this major let down and people say, ‘I already gave,’ ” Hansen said.

The USA for Africa-Live Aid-Band Aid efforts obviously helped. The total number of famine victims who will need emergency food and medicine this year dropped by 10 million from 1985. U.N. officials credit much of the turnaround to increased rainfall and rock charity’s publicity.

But the devastation--particularly in the East African nations of Ethiopia and Sudan--seems far from over. According to the U.N., Ethiopia alone will need $537 million in aid just to meet its emergency needs this year; $296 million of that will go toward actual food shipments.

The Marxist-governed nation that became the first focus of the rock charity campaign has been wracked by civil and border wars as well as drought. The easing of both the famine and its own political strife has triggered one of the largest mass migrations in Ethiopia’s history: 63,000 have returned to their homelands in northern Ethiopia from the Sudan and, in the south, a staggering 570,000 have come back to Ethiopia from Somalia in recent months, according to U.N. statistics.

In the Sudan, the emergency price-tag this year will be $154 million. Many Ethiopian refugees have returned to their homes in the northern Ethiopian provinces of Eritrea and Tigray, but another 496,000 have not. They still live in eastern Sudanese relief camps and require food and health care.

And the list continues: Mozambique will need $51 million in aid, Angola $50 million, Mauritania $35 million and Niger $26 million.

Last week U.N. officials asked USA for Africa to come up with $2.25 million to ship emergency grain to the western Sudan, where as many as a million people are facing starvation. USA for Africa executive director Marty Rogol said last week that his agency would oblige, even though it would temporarily exhaust the special “rapid response” fund that USA for Africa sets aside for emergency aid.

Rogol said that the foundation board of directors voted Tuesday to replenish its $2 million “rapid response” fund with money earmarked for long-term construction projects. He said that would assure that emergency money will remain available the USA for Africa coffers.

“I can’t say Hands Across America is a mistake,” Hansen said. “The problem of homeless and hungry in the U.S. exists. People I know who work in the area say that the figures are frightening for an industrialized nation like the U.S.

“But it is a danger for agencies like us, and USA for Africa, to cry wolf too many times. It’s up to us to present an intelligent case, not just an emotional one.

“The main thing is that the problems caused over the past 10 years in Africa are not going to be solved in 18 months,” said Hansen. “People have been eating their seeds. So the rains have returned, but they have nothing to plant.”