Africa carries 4.5 percent of the world's airline traffic but has 25 percent of the total accidents, a top air transport official said in South Africa on Wednesday.

Giovani Bisignani, director-general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), said African governments need to do more to support the aviation industry.

"While South Africa has a well-developed air transport system, this is not true for many parts of Africa," he said.

He said governments were not making "strategic investments" to support the aviation industry and were also not re-investing taxes and charges.

At many airports, the runways, airfield lighting, weather information and navigation aids were not up to standard.

While the world bank had spent 30 billion US dollars on infrastructure in Africa, only 800,000 million dollars would be spent on aviation, Bisignani said.

Airlines were "bleeding red ink" and had lost 36 billion dollars between 2001 and 2004.

He said that the good news was that passenger traffic had increased 8.3 percent this year. "But the problem is that the fuel (price) is robbing our profitability."

Bisignani added that the proposed tax on airline tickets to fight poverty was nonsense. "The travel industry is the backbone of many countries in Africa, and it is not in the best interest of Africa."

Source: Xinhua