By CELIA W.DUGGER


NZVERE, Zimbabwe - Along a road in Matabeleland, barefoot children stuff their pockets with corn kernels that have blown off a truck as if the brownish bits, good only for animal feed in normal times, were gold coins.

In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their only meal, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices except the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.

And on the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, which once helped feed all of southern Africa, destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan.“If you get that, you have a meal,”said Standford Nhira, a spectrally thin farmer whose rib cage is etched on his chest and whose socks have collapsed around his sticklike ankles.

The half-starved haunt the once bountiful landscape of Zimbabwe, where a recent United Nations survey found that 7 in 10 people had eaten either nothing or only a single meal the day before.

Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless - and so far successful - quest to hang on to power.

But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.

The survey conducted by the United Nations World Food Program in October found a shocking deterioration in the past year alone. The survey, recently provided to international donors, found that the proportion of people who had eaten nothing the previous day had risen to 12 percent from zero, while those who had consumed only one meal had soared to 60 percent from only 13 percent last year.

For almost three months, from June to August, Mr.Mugabe banned international charitable organizations from operating, depriving more than a million people of food and basic aid after the country had already suffered one of its worst harvests.

Mr. Mugabe defended the suspension by arguing that some Western aid groups were backing his political rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, who bested him at the polls in March but withdrew before a June 27 runoff. But civic groups and analysts said Mr.Mugabe’s real motive was to clear rural areas of witnesses to his military-led crackdown on opposition supporters and to starve those supporters.

No food aid has reached the village of Jirira in Mashonaland, near Harare, the capital. So each morning, people rise before the sun and stumble from their huts to fill metal pails with the small, foul-smelling hacha fruit. The sweet, fibrous, yellow pulp of the fruit has become the staple of the villagers’diet. The fruit is now infested with tiny brown worms. Nevertheless, the women peel it, crush it and soak it in water.

The story is much the same in Jirira. Hacha fruit has mostly sustained the villagers, but soon the season will be over. And then what- Gloria Mapisa, the mother of a 1-year-old girl, said,“Only God knows what will happen.”


An ongoing food crisis has left many residents of Zimbabwe with little to eat but salvaged corn kernels, left, and crickets.