By Robin McKie, The Observer
MCHINJI, Malawi—"Please forgive my ramblings," said the old man, stooped and still as he sat on a wooden stool in front of his mud hut. "The hunger makes my mind wander."
In his lucid moments, Lucas Lufuzi recites the numbers, calibrating his catastrophe. Three days since he's eaten. One son dead. Two grandchildren to feed. Two seasons of crops spoiled by erratic weather—rain one year, drought the next. "I have never seen such starvation," said Lufuzi.
What is taking shape across southern Africa is the perfect famine, a disastrous collaboration between nature and man that has caused the region's worst food shortage in nearly 60 years.
Officials in the region say as many as 20 million people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. The U.N. World Food Program is already feeding more than 2.6 million people in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia and other countries in the region, and agency officials say that number will at least double in the coming months as peasants finish off the meager yields from this season's harvest.
"We've got a full-scale famine on our hands," said Kerran Hedland, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program in Malawi.
A year of flooding followed by a year of drought are largely to blame for the widespread crop failure. But international donors, Western diplomats and civic organizations say the crisis has been aggravated by political upheaval in neighboring Zimbabwe.
President Robert Mugabe's seizure of white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe has hurt not only that country's crop yields but those of its neighbors. With one of the region's most robust agricultural sectors, Zimbabwe for years sold or donated surplus crops to other African countries that needed help.
But Mugabe's violent, two-year-old campaign to redistribute farms to poor, landless blacks has disrupted farming. Food production in Zimbabwe has dropped by nearly 40 percent this year, and Mugabe has joined Malawi's president, Bakili Muluzi, in declaring a state of emergency.
Southern Africa has endured widespread food shortages before, most recently a decade ago when drought struck the region. But the situation now is far worse, many Africans say, partly because famished peasants are eating tree stems, sawdust and wild leaves, causing an increase in disease.
"You would see people eating green maize" during the drought in the early 1990s, "but you didn't see people eating the roots of trees," said Sister Agnes Eneyasicio, of St. Mary's Catholic Church in the village of Ludzi, in Mchinji district near the border with Zambia.
When St. Mary's opened a feeding center for 600 children in January, "our two schools were completely empty," she said. "The children were too hungry to come to school. You'd go and find whole villages empty because everyone was out searching for food. We've never experienced anything like this in Malawi." |
