”Please forgive my ramblings,” said the old man, 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. Thirty-one tiny cobs of unripe corn. Two grandchildren to feed. One son: 29 years alive; 21 days dead. Two seasons of crops spoiled by weather – rain one year, drought the next.
”I have never seen such starvation,” said Lufuzi, who believes he is close to 60. ”Our family relied on my son to work the farm and for the income he earned [working part time on commercial farms]. When my grandchildren’s feet began to swell from hunger, I had no choice but to harvest the crops before they were ready. This,” he said, nodding to a basket of shrivelled corn, ”is all that keeps us from death.”
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 say as many as 20-million people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. The United Nations World Food Programme 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 meagre yields from this season’s harvest.
Overall, relief workers anticipate they will need roughly 145 000 tons of food, worth about $69-million, to plug the immediate shortfall in domestic crop production in the region. So far, donors have pledged only about $3-million. Officials with the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a coalition of 14 nations, say they will need to import 3,2-million tons of corn to offset the deficit, about double the amount imported last year.
”We’ve got a full-scale famine on our hands,” said Kerran Hedland, a spokeswoman for the World Food Programme in Malawi. A year of flooding followed by a year of drought are largely to blame for the crop failure. But international donors, Western diplomats and civic organisations say the crisis has been aggravated by graft – or at least mismanagement – in Malawi and by political upheaval in Zimbabwe, usually one of the continent’s most reliable food producers.
Malawian officials last year inexplicably sold the country’s 167 000 ton emergency grain reserve and have not accounted for the proceeds. Officials have denied wrongdoing and promised an investigation, but the International Monetary Fund, Britain, the European Union and other sources have frozen at least $75-million in aid payments as a result.
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 neighbours. Mugabe’s violent campaign to redistribute farms to poor, landless blacks has disrupted farming and cut off routes used to transport food to neighbouring countries. Food production in Zimbabwe has dropped by nearly 40% this year, according to SADC officials, and last week Mugabe joined Malawi’s president, Bakili Muluzi, in declaring a state of emergency.
The food reserve scandal in Malawi and Zimbabwe’s turmoil have compounded the problem by depleting stocks and driving up the price of corn by as much as 300% in Malawi and in Zambia.
Southern Africa has endured widespread food shortages before, but the situation now is far worse partly because famished peasants are eating tree stems, sawdust and wild leaves, causing an increase in disease.