Thu 11 Mar 2010
The International Red Cross has launched an urgent appeal for funding in response to a new hunger crisis in Zimbabwe.
Some 2.8 million Zimbabweans - almost a third of the population - are in need of food aid, and the number is expected to rise as a result of a widespread drought.
Across Masvingo province, in the centre of the country, the parched fields are full of dead or dying maize.
Sky News found a family of four orphans picking through the weeds on their land around their homestead, trying to find something edible.
Ernest Mheti, 17, is caring for his two brothers, aged nine and seven, and his 13-year-old sister.
He was relying on his now-shrivelled crop, planted alongside the mounds of earth that mark the graves of his parents, to provide them with food for the next six months.
“I cannot sleep at night because I know they are suffering because I cannot find food,” Ernest said.
The Red Cross has set up feeding programmes to try to support the most vulnerable, but a lack of funding means only limited help.
At one of the centres, more than 60 children under the age of five queued up to get their plates filled with a pile of maize meal porridge and beans.
They are all orphans, and the two meals a day they are given at the centre are all they get to eat. Sometimes the money - and the food - runs out.
“When we don’t feed them, they just get water at home,” project co-ordinator Musa Gumbo said.
The Red Cross is facing a shortfall of $23.9m (£15.9m) for its programmes in Zimbabwe, which include home care for those infected by HIV.
Hunger is impacting the efforts to provide anti-retroviral treatment to the sick because the medication has to be taken on a full stomach.
“We have seen people default on their treatment because the drugs are too toxic without food,” Emma Kundishora, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Red Cross, said.
Zimbabwe’s year-old national unity government, led by president Robert Mugabe and his old rival Morgan Tsvangirai, has so far done little to address the widespread poverty that was largely caused by Mugabe’s years of misrule.
(Source)
