Death is stalking Zimbabwe’s children, as a potentially catastrophic famine gathers momentum. Aid agencies say that half the population, about five million people, face starvation, two-thirds of children are out of school and water shortages have led to deadly cholera outbreaks.

The Times went on a 600-mile (965km)journey through the eastern province of Manicaland and discovered a country whose reserves of food are exhausted and where the diseases of hunger — kwashiorkor, marasmus and pellagra — are appearing to a degree never seen in the country before.

Emaciated children are dying in hospitals, many more are being turned away to die at home. At one Manicaland hospital a doctor said that they were getting more cases of hunger-related diseases than ever before. “Half of the admissions end up in the mortuary,” the doctor said. The situation is the same across the country, including urban areas. “In the 32 years I have worked in Zimbabwe as a paediatrician I have never known a more serious situation,” said Greg Powell, chairman of the Zimbabwe Child Protection Society. “We can predict an exponential increase in cases of kwashiorkor and malnutrition over the next six months.”

Six weeks ago President Mugabe relaxed partially a three-month-old ban on food distribution by aid agencies but restrictive regulations still handicap the delivery of relief severely.

“Malnutrition is a silent emergency that affects young children and they die quietly,” said Geoff Foster, a paediatrician in the provincial hospital in Mutare. “There is a famine situation prevailing and it is desperate.”

In forlorn, rundown hospitals all over Manicaland children’s malnutrition wards are full. The small patients lay deathly still, their hair sparse reddish clumps on oversized heads, their bodies swollen with oedema, all characteristic signs of kwashiorkor.

“I had an eight-year-old boy in the ward with kwashiorkor,” said Dr Foster. “That is highly unusual, it’s mostly confined to two and three-year-olds. That’s an indication of how serious the hunger is.”

A doctor in a mission hospital in Nyanga district was examining a child with severe kwashiorkor. The doctor explained that the hospitals lack lifesaving protein supplements, “so we use diluted milk. They are supposed to get six feeds a day. But we get milk one day and for the next five there is nothing.

Many starving children are sent away. “In hospital we cannot feed them,” said the doctor hopelessly. “At least at home they can scrounge for things. We only keep those that we can see won’t make it at home. We have lost the battle before we have fought it.”

At one district hospital well over a hundred HIV-positive patients came in for antiretrovirals last week. Every one of them was suffering from malnutrition.

Another doctor told of a mother who died in childbirth leaving an HIV-positive infant. “The grandmother was here but she would not take the child. She said she could not feed it, there was no food at home. So we are stuck with the child. It’s starvation all over, starving, starving, starving.”

Pellagra, an adult form of malnutrition that ends in madness and death, is becoming commonplace, and not just among impoverished rural folk. Three private doctors said that they had seen patients with severe symptoms in the past fortnight. None had seen it before. “People who come to private doctors have money. So it means the middle classes are starving,” said one.

In a few weeks the rainy season will begin and planting ought to be in full swing, yet the sight of a ploughed field anywhere in Zimbabwe is rare. Government promises of fertiliser and maize seeds are, for another year, proving empty. “What harvest?” a doctor joked.

At Changadzi village in the south of the province, Celestina Sithole was surrounded by hard, barren earth. Her daughter had the red hair of kwashiorkor. The stores of maize had run out and that morning she had made porridge for her children from the pods of baobab trees. She did not know what she was going to make for lunch.

Doctors tell of people drawing up rosters, with one person given “sadza”, a stiff maizemeal porridge that is the national staple, while the rest eat only boiled cabbage.

The Government is doing its best to cover up the situation. Most doctors are told not to talk about the situation publicly — which is why for their own safety many of those The Times spoke to are not identified. “We are not allowed to appeal to the donor organisations,” added one, “it’s terrible because so often help is so close, but we can do nothing about it.”

When Zimbabwe’s Government does spend money on the health sector it does not help the people. Three months ago the Central Bank allocated $5 million (£3 million,) which was used to buy imported cars for the state’s 100 or so specialist doctors. President Mugabe’s expulsion of white farmers from their farms since 2000 precipitated the crisis.

“The situation can be salvaged if aid agencies are allowed to distribute food,” said one senior doctor sounding a note of hope. “But the trouble is Mugabe and Zanu (PF) [who] think, ‘So what if people starve?’. If they hold on, it will be another Ethiopia.”

President Mugabe appointed two members of his own party to be Zimbabwe’s vice-presidents yesterday as he continued with moves to take full control of the “power-sharing” Government (Jan Raath writes). The decision to appoint Joseph Msika and Joyce Mujuru without consultation drew criticism from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg yesterday said that they would consider “additional measures” if the power-sharing deal was blocked.

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