‘They call this the Massive Hunger. It is reaching everybody’

Carl O’Brien in Malawi on the food crisis that is hitting the African country

EIGHTY-YEAR-OLD Ayines Mkunule has never been forced to eat the poisonous roots of the banana tree to try to survive.

Until now.

Sitting on the dusty surface outside her mud hut, with its collapsed thatched roof, the elderly mother of six says she will try anything to feed her large family.

She points to a pile of dried peapods in the doorway of her dark hut which they don't normally eat because it makes them sick.

"I cook it for 12 hours to make sure we can eat it," she says. "When it is not well cooked, the children die. It has already happened in the other villages."

She may not know it, but Ayines and her family are victims of a food crisis which is threatening up to 13 million people in six countries across southern Africa.

Drought, the failure of crops and government mismanagement of emergency grain supplies means many have nothing.

And things may get worse in the months ahead when the rains come and stores of food are exhausted.

"They call this the Massive Hunger," says Mario Mame, 20, a local aid programme monitor with aid agency Goal.

"It is reaching everybody. In some villages even the chiefs need the emergency supplies."

A decade ago famine stalked this land, although a major catastrophe was averted because the drought did not affect the entire country.

Today the window of opportunity to avert a major humanitarian crisis across the entire region of southern Africa is closing.

And aid agencies are engaged in a race against time to deliver food to the villages most at risk.

USAid and the World Food Programme have provided thousands of tonnes of maize and beans to the countries affected by the food crisis. And here in the Blantyre and Chiradzulu district of southern Malawi, a team from Goal is responsible for distributing the food to 175,000 people every month.

"We're targeting the people who have nothing," says Goal's Anne Marie O'Donoghue, originally from Nenagh, Co Tipperary.

"They are the subsistence farmers, households headed by children, by grandmothers looking after orphans, the disabled, the seriously ill. As soon as the food comes in, we shift it on as fast as possible."

The chilling images of Ethiopia in 1984 are not evident yet.

Instead, since the government earlier this year declared a state of emergency, aid agencies like Goal have been providing an umbilical link to people who would otherwise have nothing.

It is early morning outside Tempuka Village and hundreds of villagers have arrived for the monthly food distribution.

There is an excited buzz among the crowd who are dressed mostly in their best and most colourful clothes.

Ayines Mkunle sits patiently with the 1,500 others to receive their grain which will help see them through the next month.

Village by village, name by name, those registered for aid from Goal are called into the line in front of the warehouse where the sacks of maize are waiting, only a fingerprint's signature away.

They are grandmothers left with the burden of caring for the orphans of their dead children.

They are children struggling to provide for younger sisters and brothers after having lost their parents.

They are people so weakened by HIV and Aids that they may not be alive when the agency calls around to distribute aid next month.

Each household receives a 50kg bag of maize, 5kg of beans and 5kg of likunai pala, a local form of corn soya blend.

Likunai pala provides vital carbohydrates and proteins which they will have to ration out over the next month.

The aid workers keep a close eye on the sacks of grain, which are meticulously weighted and accounted for, to ensure it gets to those who need it most.

Women and it is mostly women walk anything up to 8km home with the heavy white bags balanced on their heads, and sometimes carrying a baby on their back as well.

While floods and drought are being blamed for food shortages, politics is also at play in this grim theatre of disaster.

The heavily indebted Malawian government, under pressure from donor countries concerned that its emergency food stocks were costing too much to keep and were rotting, sold off most of its reserves.

Nothing was done to replenish them. Maize prices tripled overnight and are now way beyond the means of most subsistence farmers who make up 90% of Malawi's 10 million-strong population.

Goal, like other aid agencies, does not involve itself in the politics of the situation.

However, Anne Marie O'Donoghue insists that the people need considerably more than just emergency food aid. For instance, farmers need more training and resources to extricate themselves from the poverty cycle.

"At the moment all we're doing is keeping people alive," she says. "What we want to do is to help farmers with seeds, tools, fertiliser and irrigation so they can farm. It means you're giving them what they need to support themselves."

Back in Tempuka Village a little child plays in the dust with some milk cartons tied together with string.

He is oblivious to the crisis around him.

As the rainy seasons draws in and people wait for the next harvest, his family's position will become even more precarious.

Ayines Mkunle shows us inside her dark, ramshackle hut where pea pods are boiling in a small back pot.

"Life is so difficult this time," she says. "When there were food shortages before, my husband could help to find food. Now he is gone. Now there is no one to help me."

The rest of her family sit listlessly in the shadows, away from the baking sun.

They have nothing in the world except a chair and a straw mat which they offer to their visitors.

The sacks of grain that arrive will help to keep starvation at bay for the next few weeks. However, she is utterly dependent on handouts. And so there is little to do except to wait for the trucks to arrive next month.

Ayines is dressed in a colourful but tattered dress.

Her arms are stick like and her skin folds down around her shrunken body like a curtain. As we leave, she smiles joylessly. While her face crinkles into a laboured smirk, her sad eyes say more than words ever could.