"We meet at a critical juncture in history for Africa," IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told the opening of a conference in the Tanzanian capital to discuss ways of easing the crisis' impact on Africa.

"And the threat is not only economic, there is a real risk that millions will be thrown back into poverty," he said.

"This is not only about protecting economic growth or household incomes, it is also about containing the threat of civil unrest, perhaps even a war. It is about people and their futures," he said.

Conference host President Jakaya Kikwete said "the current crisis poses the greatest danger to Africa's development in recent history."

The IMF chief said tumbling trade, declining remittances and dwindling foreign investment were piling pressure on Africa and predicted African growth of about three percent in 2009, half the rate forecast last year.

"Even this could be too optimistic if the crisis deepens," he said.

Many of the 300 participants in the conference pointed out that single private firms in the Western world had received bail-outs larger than the financial support for the whole of Africa.

"At a time when the international community is finding hundreds of billions of dollars for crisis resolution, I cannot accept that we will not be able to find hundreds of millions for low-income countries," Strauss-Kahn said.

Adding to the doom and gloom at the conference, the first such meeting to focus on Africa, former UN chief Kofi Annan said the threat was "the economic equivalent of a tsunami".

Strauss-Kahn said the global growth rate in 2009 could dip below zero for the first time in 60 years.

African banks had invested little in the so-called "toxic" assets that ignited the crisis and the continent was relatively spared by the first phase of the global downturn last year.

"Africa is now on the front line," said Annan, attending the conference in his capacity as chair of the Africa Progress Panel.

The IMF has warned that a decade of gains by the continent -- where half the countries now have single-digit inflation and fiscal deficits below five percent -- risked being wiped out.

Annan made a series of proposals aimed at tackling the continent's woes, calling for a dramatic increase in concessional lending and greater commitment to improve security.

He also insisted that donors should make good on their aid pledges to developing nations at the G-8 meeting hosted by Italy in July.

But anti-poverty activist and musician Bob Geldof highlighted deep hypocrisy in donor behaviour, arguing that rich countries were only worried about saving themselves.

"Berlusconi doesn't give a crap," Geldof told participants, referring to the Italian prime minister. "It's nowhere on his radar. Why are Africans going (to the G-8) if they're not going to get anything out of it."

Jeffrey Sachs, a leading economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, concurred and shamed rich countries for reneging on pledges made at the 2005 Gleneagles G-8 summit.

"One of the tragedies of recent years is that even in the good period the rich countries were failing to live up to their promises," he told AFP.

Sachs argued that, given past failures, African countries should not wait for aid from anybody or conditional lending from the IMF and instead seek low-rate loans from Japan, China or whoever wants to lend them money.

"Don't wait for permission from anybody... The donors got this wrong for 30 years," he said.

"If we think that the poor should just go away, we'll be very much mistaken and contribute to great planetary risk. That's the way we're behaving right now," Sachs said.

Sachs said he hoped to launch a new five-billion-dollar fund to assist smallholder farmers in Africa at next month's G-20 summit in London.

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