Hunger gripping rural Zimbabwe

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- The U.N. food aid agency is calling for help for Zimbabwe after finding people in rural areas subsisting on wild fruits.

The agency made the discovery when it was finally got access to the countryside after months of being blocked by the government. It is appealing for more donations to fight hunger there.

As the humanitarian crisis deepened, Zimbabwe's politicians deadlocked in power-sharing talks.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai called for former South African President Thabo Mbeki, a mediator in previous talks, to intervene, saying at a news conference in the Zimbabwean capital Thursday that his party wanted a "fair power-sharing arrangement that allows us to deal with the current economic crisis and at the same time restore democratic freedoms in the country."

Zimbabwe's governing party had accused independent groups of supporting opposition activists and barred them from distributing aid for three months. The ban was lifted in late August, but the groups, which had denied the accusations of political bias, were not able to resume work immediately for logistical reasons.

World Food Program spokesman Richard Lee accompanied workers handing out dried corn, vegetable oil and other aid in central Zimbabwe last weekend in one of the first mass distributions since the ban was lifted.

Zimbabwe's economic collapse, with inflation of at least 231 million percent a year, has put seeds, fertilizer and farming equipment out of the reach of many. AIDS has devastated the farming workforce. Weather also has played a role, with too much rain in some areas and too little in others last year.

The combination of factors and years of food scarcity have put Zimbabwe in a category all its own in a region where other countries are poor and others have been buffeted by AIDS and bad weather.

"Zimbabwe is the only one that is facing a national crisis," Lee said.

In a video Lee shot of the distribution, villagers were shown painstakingly picking kernels from the ground after just a handful of grain spilled, shaking off the dust and placing the food carefully in bags before hauling it home on their backs, in wheelbarrows, or on burros.

Lee said in an interview after returning to neighboring South Africa that people told him they were experiencing one of the hungriest years they could remember.

"In previous years, we used to harvest a few bags of grain," Sabath Musiiwa, a 54-year-old caring for her TB-afflicted husband and four children, said in Lee's video. "But this year there is nothing."

Lee said the World Food Program found Zimbabweans getting by on one meal a day, of corn meal porridge and a few vegetables for the lucky, but only wild fruits for others.

The U.N. estimates 45 percent of Zimbabwe's population, or 5.1 million people, will need food help by early 2009. The food agency said its stocks would run out in January -- "at the very peak of the crisis" -- if it did not get more help from donors. In a statement Thursday the agency said it has received almost $175 million so far this year for Zimbabwe, but needed $140 million more to fund emergency operations through April.

The food agency's main donors for Zimbabwe include the United States and Britain, two of the sharpest critics of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe blames his country's economic woes on Western sanctions, but his critics point to farm seizures he ordered in 2000. Most of the best farms that were seized went to Mugabe loyalists instead of the impoverished blacks he said he wanted to help, and the land lies idle, devastating the economy's agricultural base.

Zimbabwe's infrastructure also was deteriorating, leading to diseases like cholera. The Herald, a state-controlled Zimbabwe newspaper, reported Thursday that because of a cholera outbreak in northern Zimbabwe, police were destroying fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and bread sold by illegal vendors and suspected of being the source of the outbreak.

As Zimbabweans suffer shortages of food, medicine, hard currency and cash, power-sharing negotiations between Mugabe and his main political rivals have been stalled in an argument over who gets which key Cabinet posts. Until the political impasse is broken, Zimbabwean leaders cannot turn their full attention to their growing humanitarian crisis.

Opposition leader Tsvangirai accused Mugabe's party of trying to cling to too many key ministries. Mugabe's party has accused the opposition of holding up agreement.

Mugabe's chief negotiator Patrick Chinamasa on Wednesday accused the opposition of negotiating in public and said that could endanger the talks.

But Tsvangirai said Thursday: "We have reached a stage where talking to each other is getting us nowhere and the public has a right to know why."

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