NZVERE, Zimbabwe — Along a road in Matabeleland, barefoot children stuff their pockets with corn kernels that have blown off a truck as if the brownish bits, good only for animal feed in normal times, were gold coins.
In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their only meal, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices except the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.
And on the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, once a breadbasket for all of southern Africa, destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan. “If you get that, you have a meal,” said Standford Nhira, a spectrally thin farmer whose rib cage is etched on his chest and whose socks have collapsed around his sticklike ankles.
The half-starved haunt the once bountiful landscape of Zimbabwe, where a recent United Nations survey found that 7 in 10 people had eaten either nothing or only a single meal the day before.
Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless — and so far successful — quest to hang on to power.
But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.
The survey conducted by the United Nations World Food Program in October found a shocking deterioration in the past year alone. The survey, recently provided to international donors, found that the proportion of people who had eaten nothing the previous day had risen to 12 percent from zero, while those who had consumed only one meal had soared to 60 percent from only 13 percent last year.
For almost three months, from June to August, Mr. Mugabe banned international charitable organizations from operating, depriving more than a million people of food and basic aid after the country had already suffered one of its worst harvests.
Mr. Mugabe defended the suspension by arguing that some Western aid groups were backing his political rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, who bested him at the polls in March but withdrew before a June 27 runoff. But civic groups and analysts said Mr. Mugabe’s real motive was to clear rural areas of witnesses to his military-led crackdown on opposition supporters and to starve those supporters.
The country’s intertwined political and humanitarian crises have become ever more grave — with a cholera epidemic sweeping the nation, its health, education and sanitation systems in ruins and power-sharing talks at an impasse. Meanwhile, Mr. Mugabe has blamed Western sanctions, largely aimed at senior members of his government, for the country’s woes.
His information minister even charged last week that Britain, Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler, had started the cholera outbreak — spread by water contaminated with human feces — as an act of “biological chemical war force,” a charge widely derided as paranoid or cynical.
But for all Mr. Mugabe’s venom toward the West, a central paradox rests at the heart of his long years in power. It was the failed policies of Mr. Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, including their calamitous seizure of commercial farms, that made this nation so utterly dependent on aid from the European and American donors he so reviles. And the same applies to Western leaders: Despite their scathing denunciations of him, it is their generous donations that have helped him survive by preventing outright famine among his people.
“You’re acting to save lives, knowing that by doing so you are sustaining this government,” said one aid agency manager, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “And unfortunately, ZANU-PF is good at exploiting this humanitarian imperative.”
American-financed charities and the World Food Program have been feeding millions of Zimbabweans since late 2002, at a cost of $1.25 billion over the years. After a slow start this year because of the aid suspension, the United States and the United Nations are feeding almost half of Zimbabwe’s population this month.
But the World Food Program is short of nearly half the food needed for January, said Richard Lee, a spokesman.