GRANDMOTHER Ndlolo Dube sits on the dusty ground outside her mud-and-pole hut and looks out on a land that has never seemed so dry and unforgiving. The field that was supposed to feed her and her four orphaned grandchildren is littered with dead broken maize stalks.

“No rain,” she says, as she shows the half-full 50kg bag of maize that is all the family has harvested this year. It is the third year running that the harvest has failed, but this time is by far the worst. “It’s just enough to last two or three weeks, then I don’t know what we’ll do.”

At every hut, every village, it is the same story. Plumtree and Figtree sound as if they should be verdant places but severe drought has left the area, like much of southern Zimbabwe, with 95% crop failure. People sit with dazed expressions, fuddled with hunger. The United Nations World Food Programme estimates that 4m people will need food aid.

Shortages are no longer new in this country where President Robert Mugabe’s violent land seizures have seen the destruction of commercial farms that provided work for millions and food for the whole region. But this year they come amid inflation estimated to have reached 10,000-15,000%.

By the end of June prices were doubling daily. Last week the government sent in police and militia youths to force shopkeepers to lower prices. Many responded by locking their doors and suspending business.

Dube has no idea how she and her family will survive for the rest of the year. “I have no cow, no goats, nothing,” she says.

When I ask how often they eat, she replies: “Morning and evening.” Surprised, I ask what they ate that morning. “Nothing,” she says. And the previous evening? “Nothing.” It turns out that they often go for days without eating.

Sometimes the children get so hungry they chew green fruits from a tree known as African chewing gum, even though they know they will end up with stomach ache.

Two of Dube’s grandchildren — 10-year-old twins Kwenza Kele and Flatter — take me with them to collect water. They are smaller than my seven-year-old back home. The water-hole has a fence of twisted logs to prevent cows defecating but it is green and putrid water, topped with scum.

This year’s maize harvest is expected to be 500,000 tonnes, compared with the 1.4m tonnes needed. But Pius Ncube, the Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, believes the shortages will help Mugabe in the run-up to elections next March.

“The government is very happy about the food situation as they know they can use food to make people vote for them again,” he says. “They use every advantage.”

At the next village, Grandmother Dedi Ndlovu is complaining about pain in her legs. She harvested just 20kg of maize for her nine grandchildren, eight of whom are orphans. “Not even half a bag,” she says. “In the past we would get six or seven bags. Sometimes I think, what if I get sick and die? What will happen to these children?”

It is a while before I notice something even more eerie than the impending famine. These are villages of grandparents and grandchildren. There is nobody of my age. In a whole day we meet only one person between the ages of 20 and 50.

“All the young people have either died or gone,” explains Pastor Raymond, the local clergyman.

Many have fallen victim to the lethal combination of Aids and hunger. Others are part of an exodus of 4m Zimbabweans forced for economic and political reasons to leave their country.

In the towns I have noticed fewer people on the streets, but it is only in these villages that the figures are brought home. This is a country that has lost an entire generation.

Amid the breakdown of society — 20-hour power cuts, water shortages, collapse of the phone system — nobody I ask, whether government official, diplomat or aid worker, has any idea what the population of Zimbabwe is any more.

“That’s the $25m question,” says a US diplomat, suggesting the figure may be as low as 8m, instead of the 12m usually cited.

In 15 years, life expectancy has fallen to 34 years for women and 37 for men, by far the lowest in the world. What some call a silent genocide has left Zimbabwe with more orphans than anywhere else in the world — 1.4m according to Unicef.

At Bulawayo’s vast West Park cemetery, it is easy to spot the recent arrivals — a large plot freshly dug, with row after row of graves, barely a plank’s width between them. The gravestones tell their own story. All were born in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Over on the other side in the children’s section is a line of tiny earth mounds, the graves of babies who have died in the past week.

At the edges of the graveyard are odd areas of tossed earth. “People come in at night and bury their relatives secretly at the margins because they cannot afford proper burials,” explains Pastor Useni Sibanda, who leads a church in Bulawayo and speaks for the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, an umbrella grouping of church groups and other civic organisations.

Those who can join burial clubs — macabre savings groups where people in a street or a workplace join together to pay for each other’s dead. Others register sick relatives under false names at hospitals, knowing they cannot afford a funeral.

Nobody knows how many have died of hunger. But doctors in Zimbabwe say the population’s chronic malnutrition, combined with HIV, leads to the onset of full-blown Aids far faster than anywhere else in Africa.

Father Oskar Wermter, a German Jesuit priest working in Mbare, Harare’s oldest township, has spent 37 years in Zimbabwe and says he has never seen things so bad, even during the liberation war.

“How do people survive in this situation?” he asks. “The answer is many just don’t but you don’t see them.”

He cites the case of Chipo Kurewa, a lively teacher in her forties whose home was bulldozed during Operation Murambatsvina (Drive out the Filth) in which 700,000 people saw their houses and businesses demolished.

“After that, she was in constant trouble, struggling to find work and accommodation and then diagnosed HIV-positive,” says Wermter.

He took Kurewa to a centre to get anti-retroviral drugs, but then she disappeared. “One day I got a phone call from Botswana. It was her — she’d gone to find work. About six weeks later she arrived in a terrible state. A kind lady in Gaborone had put her on a bus. But she had meningitis. Three days later she was dead.”

I ask after Stella, one of his parishioners, who had taken me round Mbare 18 months ago to see those who lost their homes in Murambatsvina. I remembered her flamboyant clothes and vivacious manner, despite the horror we were seeing and the risks we were taking.

“Dead,” he replies. “This is becoming a land of the elderly and very young, the unqualified and under-qualified — in other words, the most vulnerable.”

There are other effects too. All the children I speak to are much older than their size would suggest, and a recent study found that more than one in three people in Harare suffers mental disorders. The main reasons were inability to find food and having belongings taken away by the authorities.

Zimbabwe is not yielding photographs of children with stick limbs and flies on their mouths, the images we usually associate with famine in Africa. Something more sinister is under way, almost as if life were just draining out of the country.

At a shack selling firewood in Emakhandeni township, just outside Bulawayo, Sibanda stops to load up and says: “If the middle classes have been so pauperised that teachers are forced to become prostitutes to feed their family and use firewood because there’s no more power, imagine what’s happening to the most marginalised.”

Inside the shack, a girl of 15 lies dying on a bed, her blankets soiled and life fading away. Her lips are parched and her eyes flicker weakly at us. The family do not even ask for help. They know it is the same in every shack in every township. Besides, even if we got her to hospital, there would be no drugs.

At Mpilo hospital in Bulawayo, the Japanese-funded paediatric unit was opened in 2004 and is remarkably clean and modern. Inside there are numerous empty beds. Few can afford the bus fare to the hospital.

The only medicines have been donated by a foreign aid agency. On the babies’ ward, none is connected to a monitor and only two have drips, even in the malnutrition room.

By one cot sit a couple whose seven-month-old daughter desperately needs intestinal surgery, but who have been told they must buy a drip, which they cannot afford. “We had to borrow to pay the bus fare to get here,” says the father as he watches his wife cradle the sick child.

There are only two young nurses to staff the ward of 45 seriously ill babies, treating, cleaning and feeding them.

“Anyone that can go has left the country,” says one of the nurses, pointing out that her monthly salary of Z$3.2m (£4.50) barely covers her bus fares of Z$120,000 a day. “I eat nothing during my shift as I can’t afford it.”

The only reason she and her colleague are still here, she says, is they are newly qualified and the government is withholding their diplomas. “They’re doing it deliberately to stop us going.”

There is no sign of any doctors. According to a Unicef official, 50% of all health posts in Zimbabwe are vacant and there are more Zimbabwean nurses in Manchester than in Bulawayo.

It is not just doctors who are leaving. Over the past few years, the University of Zimbabwe has seen its number of lecturers fall from more than 1,200 to just over 600. According to the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe, more than 5,000 teachers left between January and April this year.

The magnitude of the exodus becomes starkly clear across the border in South Africa, to which the majority of people flee. At the Central Methodist Church in central Johannesburg, Zimbabwean refugees are literally spilling out onto the road.

More than 3,000 sleep there every night, cramming the corridors and steps, each with a zipped bag containing all they could carry.

Yet every person I talk to is a professional: accountants, bankers, headmasters. One was the clerk of the High Court — forced to flee, he says, because he witnessed the secret police interfering with ballot boxes during a legal challenge by the opposition to presidential elections.

Most have left because the alternative was to starve. “We just couldn’t afford to feed our families,” says a group of teachers recently arrived from a school in Masvingo.

They have to leave the church by 7am every day and wander the streets hoping to pick up work as labourers or gardeners, or just begging. One man earns more in a day’s gardening than he did in a month of teaching science in Zimbabwe.

Most of the refugees are men looking for money to send back to their families. But on the ground floor is a room packed with women and children. One woman, Joyce, sits watching her two-year-old son and four-year-old daughter scrape leftovers from someone’s pan of sadza (grain meal).

“My husband passed away and I couldn’t get work in Bulawayo,” she says. “I thought if we came to South Africa we might still have hope of a life.”

It was a hazardous journey, crossing the crocodile-infested Limpopo river with the two toddlers on her back. “But I kept thinking there is nothing left for us in Zimbabwe,” she says.

“The numbers have been going up dramatically this year,” says Bishop Paul Verryn, who has fought off parishioners’ protests to shelter the Zimbabweans. “We used to see five or 10 arriving a day but for the last few months it has been 20 or more. It’s a cataclysmic collapse of a country.”

Explore World News

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Asia News

• Africa News

Times Recommends

• Toughest Olympic event at Beijing- weather forecasting
• Iraq 'gang-rape victim' can seek US trial
• Relief stuck on wrong side of Burmese border