DAKAR (Reuters) - Some 52 million people in West and Central Africa will struggle to meet their basic food and nutrition needs in the upcoming lean season, driven by conflict, extreme weather and economic deterioration, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday.

In the lean season - a period between harvests when food supplies are very low and which runs from June to August - nearly three million of those people throughout the region will face emergency levels of hunger, while 2,600 people in Mali could face catastrophic hunger, the United Nations body said, citing a new food security analysis.

The report flagged food inflation, made worse by rising fuel costs in countries including Ghana, Guinea and Ivory Coast, and recurrent extreme weather in the central Sahel, around the Lake Chad Basin and in the Central African Republic.

Conflicts have displaced 10 million people in the region, the WFP said, including eight million internally displaced inside Nigeria and Cameroon.

The report did not include the Democratic Republic of Congo, where fighting has surged in the east this year as Rwandan-backed M23 rebels have staged a major advance.

Some 28 million people face acute hunger there, a record for the central African country, according to a report released in late March by the WFP and the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

It said 2.5 million more people had become acutely hungry in Congo since the surge of violence in December.

According to the five-phase classification system used by the WFP, crisis-level hunger (Phase 3) is one step below emergency levels of hunger (Phase 4). Phase 5, the most serious, is classified as catastrophic hunger - or, in some cases, famine.

(Reporting by Alvise Armellini in Rome; Additional reporting by Ange Kasongo in Kinshasa; Writing by Portia Crowe; Editing by Gareth Jones)