THE UNITED Nations has appealed to donors to meet a $140 million (€103 million) shortfall in its plans to stave off starvation facing millions of Zimbabweans.
The call from the World Food Programme - the UN's emergency food agency - comes amid a protracted deadlock in powersharing talks between Robert Mugabe, the president, and Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader whose party yesterday accused the regime of "fiddling while Zimbabwe burns".
It is one of the clearest indications yet of the scale of suffering in the country, which is struggling with a collapsing economy and inflation that officially on Wednesday stood at 231 million per cent but which analysts believe to be far higher.
After eight years of a calamitous programme of farm seizures and repeated harvest failures, the UN has warned that as many as five million people - estimated to be about half the population - could face starvation come the new year.
"Millions of Zimbabweans have already run out of food or are surviving on just one meal a day and the crisis is going to get much worse in the coming months," Mustapha Darboe, the WFP's regional chief, said on Thursday.
The $140 million would be on top of $175 million already committed to the WFP's Zimbabwe operations.
Some aid agencies said the size of the emergency food programme would compare with the Ethiopian famine relief in the 1980s.
"People are collecting wild berries and roots, trying to find food desperately," said Peter Lundberg, who runs the Red Cross programme in Zimbabwe.
"In parts of the south, there is nothing."
- (Financial Times service)