Starving people in Malawi are reduced to eating sawdust, while those suspected of stealing maize are being mutilated or murdered. Concern is worried that international aid may be too little, too late. Why the delay?

A square of yellow cloth flutters over the chief's hut in Nambuma. He died some weeks earlier, his wife says - the rough flag has been cut from his shroud. She sits quietly on the threshold, chewing a cob of unripe maize; her neighbours have turned to wild leaves, banana-tree stems, even sawdust, to fend off the gnawing hunger.

Although she is afraid to contemplate the future, her grandson is not.

"Just say it straight," urges 10-year-old Stephen. "Soon we will have nothing to eat. And then we will die."

Desperation has gripped Malawi, the once plentiful nation now at the heart of a terrible famine looming over southern Africa. Following a terrible crop last year, stocks of maize - the staple food - have emptied, sending prices skyrocketing.

Few people can afford to buy, and in the past four months, thousands have died - some from cholera, some from the accelerated ravages of AIDS, others from starvation. The crisis has sparked a wave of unforgiving attacks on suspected maize thieves.

James Black, a penniless tobacco labourer, was attacked by four men who accused him of stealing from a neighbouring farm. They bound him, beat him bloody, then pulled out a razor and sliced off his ears. Before abandoning him, they stuffed one ear into his pocket.

"It is the hunger," he says in simple explanation.

There has been some respite in recent weeks as the annual harvest starts to come in. Farmers have slept in the fields to defend their ripening crops, some armed with "panga" knives or poison arrows.

But the pause will be perilously short-lived. If last year's crop was bad, this year it will be an unqualified disaster.

Alarmed aid workers and government officials say that 600,000 tonnes of food must be found, and fast. Otherwise up to two million people will be going hungry by August or September, and twice that many - 40 per cent of the population - by Christmas.

"If we don't get resources immediately, we won't be able to help, come August. You could be looking at tens of thousands of deaths," says Paul Harvey, a recently arrived emergency officer with the Irish aid agency, Concern Worldwide.

On the face of it, Malawi does not look like a country lurching towards crisis. The smooth roads leading out of the capital, Lilongwe, are lined with traders selling bright-red tomatoes or fresh Irish potatoes. The countryside is green and lush, buses shuttle between the towns carrying traders, mothers and children.

But the veneer of normality is deceptive. Off the main routes, in remote villages at the end of rough, bumpy roads, there is hunger and brutality.

The maize stores are empty. Famished families have sold their every possession in order to eat. Even though crops are starting to come in, at least 500,000 people need food aid, now. The social fabric of a country known as the "warm heart of Africa" has been torn down the middle. James Black was relatively lucky - other suspected thieves have had their hands chopped off, been doused in paraffin and burned alive, or hacked to death in the fields.

Medical workers in the nearby town of Kapiri told of a woman who was presented with a basket full of maize some weeks ago. When she pulled back the cobs, she found her husband's head.

"This is a whole new phenomenon," says Irish nun, Sister Catherine Dwyer, one of many missionaries pressed into action by the sudden crisis. "It is inhumanity borne of desperation."

The last time there was a food crisis, in 1992, Western donors shipped enough food to Malawi. This time, however, the response has been markedly unenthusiastic.

So far donors, including the US and European Union, have promised 144,000 tonnes, or just one quarter of the amount needed.

Western donors say that while erratic rains are partly to blame for the desperate food shortages, so is the government. They suspect corrupt officials of cynically profiting from the crisis.

Controversy centres on the sale of 167,000 tonnes of maize from the Strategic Grain Reserve - Malawi's emergency food stockpile - last year.

Donors and human-rights groups charge that politically-connected traders bought the grain cheap early in the year and sold it at profits of more than 350 per cent when prices started to rise in October.

President Bakili Muluzi, who has ordered the Anti-Corruption Board to investigate the maize reserve sale, denies any wrongdoing. He says he was ordered to sell the corn stocks by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as part of its drive towards free-market economic liberalism. His government shrugs off any responsibility for the impending famine.

It is true that the harsh "one-size-fits-all" dictates of IMF and World Bank have done few favours for Malawi's farmers.

A free fertiliser programme that could have boosted last year's crop was curtailed on the basis that it distorted the market. The government has done little to allay worries about cronyism.

Malawi is the 12th poorest country in the world yet has the second biggest gap between the rich few and the poor. Britain and the US have frozen or deferred millions of dollars in bilateral aid.

Behind the rhetoric, people are dying. In the emergency feeding centre at Nambuma, Malawian nuns feed emergency mix donated by Concern to withered infants with protruding ribcages.

One boy, Benjamin, has the thin, white hair of an old person, yet is just three years old. "We were expecting it to be better by now," says Sister Modesta. "But three-quarters of the people still have nothing to eat."

To cope, some people in Nambuma are eating unripe maize - a desperate strategy that for a subsistence farmer is like robbing your own bank. Others are selling their last possessions - radios, chickens, goats, and even doors - to buy a little maize flour.

Staiford Mpingu (32) took the thatch roof off one of his two mud-walled buildings for the sake of 70 cent, or two days' worth of food. "Nothing is left," he says despondently, sitting on the step of the roofless building. "Now we don't know what to do because our bodies are weak."

Aid is starting to arrive, but slowly. International agencies are starting to piece together a co-ordinated approach; last week the World Food Programme pleaded for $69 million to prevent famine, not only in Malawi but also in neighbouring Zambia and Zimbabwe which are also suffering from severe shortages.

But even with funding, a disaster will not be easily averted.

Served by an overburdened train system, Malawi suffers from supply bottlenecks, and must compete with its hungry neighbours for regional food surpluses, mostly from South Africa.

Even worse, meteorologists are warning of a possible recurrence later this year of El Niño, the alternation of biblical floods and drought that devastated parts of Africa in the 1990s.

Dr Ellard Malindi, permanent secretary at the Departure of Agriculture, pleads for government and donors to put aside their differences and work together immediately.

"By August or September the situation will be worsening by the day until the following harvest," he warns. "And even that one may not be good."

For more information on Concern's work in Malawi and donation details: tel 01-4754162/website www.concern.ie