05-OCT-B-5
Rural Malawi: No maize, no money, no hope
By Ed Stoddard
KHEMBO VILLAGE, Malawi, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Tobias Mozalande is an old man but in all his years he has never seen things so bad in Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries.
"This year it's too much, it's the worst," he said outside his modest hut as his wife peeled water lilies -- the only food to be had.
Obtaining them means a four hour walk from Khembo village to the Shire River, where the villagers risk being attacked by man-eating crocodiles as they search for lilies in the murky water.
Drought and a raging AIDS pandemic have left 5 million Malawians -- almost half the population -- in need of food aid to get them through to the April maize harvest, a gruelling six months away.
Aid agencies say no one is actually starving in the southern African nation but millions of people in rural areas have run dangerously short of food.
In Khembo Village, 100 km (60 miles) south of the commercial centre of Blantyre, the people have used up their staple maize crop. Money and hope are also in scant supply.
"This area is one of the worst affected in the country. Most of the households can only get about 30 percent of their food needs," said James Bwirani, a Malawi-based food security adviser for aid agency Ofxam.
The villagers here are subsistence farmers. On their tiny plots they grow mostly maize to feed their families and cotton to sell for cash.
"I planted maize but I didn't harvest any of it," said Mozalande, a short and surprisingly jovial man who has no idea how old he is.
His cotton fared only slightly better. Instead of the 200 kg (440 lb) that he normally reaps, he only managed 70 kg this year, for which he got 1,400 Malawi kwacha ($11.20) his sole source of income for the year.
In the past, he got the odd job as a manual labourer but has had nothing for a long time. His children are mostly grown -- he had 17 from three wives -- but he now looks after a grandson orphaned by AIDS.
SUPPORT SYSTEMS GONE
It is a tale of woe repeated throughout the villages of Malawi, where AIDS and a depressed economy -- not to mention a surging rural population -- have made it harder for people to cope when the rains fail.
People in the prime of life are falling ill and then dying, leaving children and the elderly to the backbreaking tasks of peasant farming.
Rising urban unemployment means there are fewer people to send cash back to their home villages.
All of the women in Khembo village, which swarms with raggedly dressed children, are engaged in the same chore: peeling small water lilies which bear a vague resemblance to turnips but look less appetising.
Meat is an unheard of luxury with only a few scrawny chickens to be seen and virtually no goats -- generally a ubiquitous sight in rural Africa.
Khembo has received some food aid but not nearly enough. A few weeks ago 20 of the 90 families in the area each got a 50 kg sack of maize meant to last for a month but they shared it out and it was gone in a week.
They don't know when to expect the next supply.
In the meantime, they have their water lilies -- a poor substitute for a starch but it's all they have.
(For more news about emergency relief visit Reuters AlertNet http://www.alertnet.org email: alertnet@reuters.com; +44 207 542 2432)