MASVINGO PROVINCE, ZIMBABWE — They look like birds pecking, grain by grain, along the nation's roadsides. Tattered women and children bend to pick up the smattering of corn blown from passing trucks. The precious grains are about all there is to eat.
Millions across Zimbabwe are on the brink of starvation, largely because of the failure of this year's harvest and the nation's collapsed economy, along with President Robert Mugabe's ban on humanitarian aid during the recent election campaign.
On the road from Harare, the capital, south to Masvingo province, a 3-year-old boy, Slupeth, collects grain with his mother, Esnat, 36, and her sister, Chipo, 26. It takes them half a day to gather a pound of ground corn, or maize, which will make a small dinner.
Half of the boy's hair has fallen out; his skin is scaly and his eyes runny. The two women are gaunt, their cheekbones sharp, their wrists like sticks. The family ran out of corn in April.
"We were told a truck spilled grain today. Without it we would have nothing to eat," said Esnat, who was afraid of being beaten by government supporters if she gave her surname.
Mugabe recently rescinded his ban on outside aid, but Richard Lee, spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program, said it would take months to get humanitarian distributions back to full speed.
Of the 1.7 million people who needed emergency food this month, only a minority have gotten help, he said. By November, the WFP hopes to be fully operational. About 5 million people, almost half the population, will need food aid by early next year, the time when food shortages usually are worst, Lee predicted.
The head man in one village in the southern province of Masvingo says he has never seen hunger so bad in his 76 years. Most people in rural areas have run out of ground corn, the staple, along with cooking oil, sugar and even salt.
They eat nothing but boiled rape, a leafy vegetable like spinach, and a wild fruit called hacha.
Esnat and Chipo used to do odd jobs for a bucket of maize, but now no one has any to spare. Their neighbors are so short of food that there is nobody left to beg from. In between gleanings from the passing trucks, the family lives on hacha.
Hunger in Zimbabwe also has a political element, many here believe. At times of food shortages, the ZANU-PF party, which has ruled for 28 years, has used the Grain Marketing Board, the state-owned monopoly grain distributor, to punish opposition activists at the village level and reward loyalists.
