In Foreign Parts: After the 'total failure' of this year's crucial harvest, Zambia stares into the face of a devastating famine

By the time Enny Mazuba returned to her village with the half-bucket of maize she had walked 50 miles to earn, her husband had already died of hunger.

After the harvest failed, he had been too weak to join her in the long trek to the farm in a neighbouring district to earn meagre rations and, instead, stayed behind to die. Her four children lived on, helped by their neighbours who took pity on them at their father's funeral and gave rations from their own small supplies.

"With God's will they were able to survive," said Mrs Mazuba, 54, as she ate from a small pot of cooked maize paid for with the sale of her last chicken. "I don't know how I will live now." Her village, Keemba, in the Southern Province of Zambia, nearly four hours drive from the capital Lusaka, was once the bread basket of the country but now the view over the blasted fields is of the stunted twigs from failed crops. As the boreholes dry up and animals die of disease, she – along with her children, the remainder of her village and millions more across southern Africa – face starvation over the next few months.

Death is already well entrenched in this rural area. Forty per cent of the province's population are estimated to have HIV/Aids, which has killed huge numbers of the country's medical staff. Malaria is ever-present, cholera and measles are dreaded, and polio remains a constant threat which, despite the huge problems, has been the focus of a huge United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) project to immunise more than one million children over the past five days.

Yet, without a huge injection of food supplies, medicines and other aid, millions more are likely to die, charities, government officials and health workers in the region unanimously agree.

Zambia, where Unicef estimates more than a fifth of its near 11 million population faces death through starvation, should have filled its grain silos and stores after harvesting up to June, to last them through the through the year. Already now in winter they are empty, along with the small straw thatched stores in around the village of Keemba, in the district of Monze, where the rain fell only twice in the last year.

Local farmers say that for this year's harvest, 60 per cent of the fields that were ploughed and prepared remained unseeded as they waited for the rains that never came to start the growing process.

Down by the waterhole, the few cattle left that had not been struck down by the tick-borne "corridor disease" waded in the water. But not for long, since Frank Lubasi, the agriculture co-ordinator for the area, said it would be dry by the end of August. A rare occurrence but the product of 30 years of erratic rainfall where volumes have declined steadily year on year.

Herdsmen will take the cattle 30 miles to the nearest water, depriving the villages of what little fresh milk was available but at least those with cattle will probably survive.

A survey of households by the Monze authorities have shown that most people were in their final month of having grain after the "total failure" of the harvest.

For Saliya Ncheema, aged 92, sitting in the shade thrown by the walls of her home among a cluster of six small mud huts, that time has already passed.

She is responsible for 18 grandchildren, her three sons having died from Aids-related illnesses. She is going blind and is too frail to supply the food for the youngsters in her family.

They cluster around her, their swollen faces and bodies showing the signs of malnutrition. The rural health centre nearby said that parents had stopped eating to ensure their children had something to eat.

After the harvest failed, the burden fell on her daughter, Naomy Hamasiki, 54, herself a widow. She grubs around the dry soil and digs up roots, with supposed medicinal qualities.

She takes these and travels north by train to Ndola, the town at the heart of the once profitable copper-producing areas to sell to miners on a stall. Usually, she makes enough money to buy one 50kg bag of maize, which will be enough to feed the whole family for three to four days. The whole round trip takes three weeks.

There are few other options for survival. In 1995, the year before Mrs Ncheema's husband died, they lost their 90 head of cattle to disease. "We are seriously struggling," she said. "I don't even know how to stand. By the grace of God we will live." She said it would only get worse but even now she had not eaten for more than a day.

Her daughter nodded and agreed that if no food supplies came "it will lead them (the children) into death".

A 45-minute drive down rutted tracks to Zambia's main north-south road, alongside which most of the population live, is the main hospital in the town of Monze itself. Staff reported that many people were already not eating a meal a day.

In 1992, 39 per cent of children were born stunted in Zambia, a figure that rose to 59 per cent in 1999. In the crowded children's ward in Monze, 10-month-old Mizinga Malanbo was being treated for malnutrition. He, along with his six-year-old sister, had returned there several times.

Their mother, Sylvia, said: "It's difficult to get the food and we use all means to get it. I will pack groundnuts and sell them by the side of the road."

For a crisis shared by most countries in the region, Zambia has its own unique difficulties. The convoys of trucks with aid that inevitably will have to roll into the country must pass through other nations threatened by starvation bringing with it the threat of hijackings and, in Zimbabwe, the prospect of total political meltdown and closed borders stopping the food from getting through.

There are further concerns that further political crises could lead to people flooding across the border from Zimbabwe to a country where conditions are no better. Unicef, estimates conservatively that Zambia needs $71m (£45m) to prevent the deaths of 2.3 million people in the country. Overall in Africa, up to 14 million people are at risk of starvation.

In Zambia, fertiliser is scarce, the infrastructure is awful and the problem with markets for crops means that only 1.7 million hectares of Zambia's 79 million hectares of land was planted with food crops in 2001-2002. In May, President Levy Mwanawasa declared a national emergency for food and a regional emergency for water.

"You have no idea how scared I am about this. I think we are going to lose a large number of people," said Stella Goings, Zambia's Unicef representative. "If the predictions for El Nino are true, this isn't going to be a one-year issue, this is going to be a two or three-year issue."

Without aid, for the people of Monze, prospects are grim. Enock Hamachila, the mayor, said simply: "There will be many funerals here."

To help the Southern Africa Food Crisis Appeal please call 0870 60 60 900 or visit www.dec.org.uk

Polio campaign

Hampered by illness, poverty and some of the most inaccessible homes in the world, Zambia undertook the vaccination of more than one million children yesterday as part of the world's attempts to finally rid itself of polio.

The $1bn (£640m) world-wide campaign has been successful so far, with cases falling from 350,000 in 1988 to 500 last year.

But Zambia is the only country that recorded new cases of polio crossing its borders this year. The illness came in from Angola, one of 10 countries where polio remains endemic. Three children, aged one, three and six, fleeing with their family from conflict in Angola, tested positive for polio in Zambia's Western Province. They had never been vaccinated.

The head of health for Unicef in Zambia, Birthe Locatelli-Rossi, said: "These three cases came as a shock to everyone. It was the first time in six years and everyone was full of fear." After an emergency campaign to protect children around Zambia's borders, the latest five-day campaign took place in 38 vulnerable districts.

About 150,000 people who have fled conflict from Angola are believed to be in camps close to the border, with more still having settled in villages, posing a threat to Zambians.

The £450,000 vaccination campaign, the biggest of its kind, is funded entirely by private donations through British Airways' Change for Good programme, which collects the spare change of travellers.

To make a donation to the Change For Good programme ring 0845 731 2312, or give via www.unicef.org.uk.