BIKITA, Zimbabwe, Dec 7 (AFP) - The crop fields are lush green in Bikita. But 1,000 hungry people in this remote southern area of Zimbabwe queue quietly under the midday sun for food aid.
They're just a fraction of the eight million starving in this southern African country. Each person standing in this feeding centre queue in Bikita, some 240 kilometres south-east of Harare, has come to collect aid for at least two other people.
Most of those waiting bear no visible signs of hunger -- no really emaciated bodies here, no protruding ribs. They have been subsisting on wild fruit, one of those queuing told AFP.
The feeding centre, reached down a dirt track of several kilometres, is manned by aid agency CARE for the UN's World Food Programme.
Villagers are called up to receive their rations -- corn meal and beans -- according to the villages they come from. The orderly queue is disturbed momentarily by a pair of cavorting donkeys, who send children shrieking and screaming.
"Our major problems are hunger, a serious drought and no rains," said Louis Nyambirai, an elderly woman from Madzvara village, about five kilometres away.
Elderly people are among those suffering most in the current crisis, a CARE field officer told AFP. Many of them cannot read or write and therefore fail to get registered for food aid.
"The law of the jungle is taking its place here," said the official, George Baloyi.
He explained that the elderly illiterate have to rely on the village headman's younger scribe taking down their details. But often the scribe makes sure his own family gets priority on the list.
"People with influence want to survive. They (the elderly) don't have any form of influence. They can't read, they can't write."
One example is 70-year-old Seraphina Mawere. Leaning on her stick, barefooted and with a woollen cap protecting her head from the sun, she has been forced to walk from village to village begging for food. She has never been on a food list.
The AIDS pandemic, rife in rural areas like Bikita, is compounding the problem.
"The death levels (from AIDS) in these villages is just continuous," said the UN's special envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, on a visit to Bikita on Friday.
"What you've got is this poisonous, ugly concoction of AIDS and famine. The immune systems are so shorn of strength because of the hunger that people die more quickly," Lewis told AFP.
A shortage of basic medicines to treat HIV patients meant that people in the area were "dying under the most grotesque of circumstances," he said.
He said the problem of AIDS orphans had become "overwhelming".
"Every day the numbers of orphans go up," he said.
There have been accusations that food aid is being distributed along party political lines in Zimbabwe.
"We tell people that food should not be used as a weapon to square up scores with your enemies," CARE official George Baloyi said.
He points to the white sacks of US-provided corn and beans that are being shared among the hungry villagers.
"It should be used freely, as it comes to us a free gift."
However, people waiting in the queues complained that the rations -- which are provided once a month -- only lasted the average family eight days. The rest of the time they have to go back to their diet of wild fruit.
Zimbabwe is the worst-hit of six southern African countries facing famine. And according to the UN's Lewis, only 56 per cent of the food required by the WFP to feed hungry Zimbabweans has been met by donors. Meanwhile the numbers of hungry people continue to mount.
The green fields offer no promise of a food-filled tomorrow. Already the maize which has germinated is wilting in the oppressive heat. The desperately-needed rains have not arrived yet this season.
"There's no hope," villager Serina Murindiwa said. The maize her village planted had already died from lack of rain, she said. If none falls soon the trees will not bear any fruit to see them through.
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