The OK supermarket in Mbare township is so empty that your voice echoes off the high warehouse roof.

On row after row of white shelving, wiped clean each day, sit a dozen cabbages. The bakery has ten plain scones. That is all the food there is in the largest supermarket serving tens of thousands of people in the oldest, and teeming, township in Harare.

One night last week, Rosa, a church volunteer, scoured Mbare for supplies to make the daily ration of maizemeal, the national staple, and some green vegetables, to be cooked without vegetable oil and often without salt. She found two loaves of bread.

“How do I feed the 14 people in my house with two loaves of bread?” Rosa asked. “Sometimes there is nothing and you go to bed with no dinner. We are living like orphans.”

Her neighbour’s breast milk for her one-year-old daughter dried up recently, she said. “She couldn’t find fresh milk or sterilised milk anywhere. So she feeds the child on Mazoe.” It is a brand of orange cordial.

It is now ten weeks since President Mugabe forced businesses to slash prices of all goods and services in the belief that he could crush inflation, which he says is a plot by the Zimbabwean private sector, in collusion with Western governments, to overthrow him.

Two things have happened: inflation has rocketed and, according to the Government, the country will run out of wheat in three days. Zimbabweans appear set to face an almost total absence of food and ordinary household goods. An eruption of public anger, to be met with violent suppression by Mr Mugabe’s security forces, is likely to follow, observers say.

Initially Mr Mugabe’s June 25 price blitz sparked a gleeful storming of shops, where managers looked on aghast as their businesses were stripped at the Government’s bidding.

Then household basics such as meat, chicken, cooking oil, milk, maizemeal, margarine, sugar and soap vanished into the black market. In the past couple of weeks it has become almost impossible to find beer, cigarettes, tea or baked beans in shops.

Outside the OK in Mbare rows of women stand behind little stools, each bearing a long bar of carbolic soap, packets of cigarettes or bottles of vegetable oil. “These are the policemen’s wives,” Rosa said.

They gain their name from the latest phase of Zimbabwe’s descent into hunger and chaos: thousands of vendors have been arrested and their goods seized in Mr Mugabe’s attempt to smash the black market. “The policemen grab the goods, they give them to their wives and then they come and sell here,” said Rosa (not her real name - nearly everyone is too afraid to be quoted in Mr Mugabe’s Zimbabwe).

The black market too is starting to dry up. “Now people are buying because they don’t know when they are going to see them again,” a supermarket chain executive said. The two main supermarket chains in Zimbabwe are each due to lay off 1,000 workers this month. The country’s main bakery closed one of its largest outlets yesterday because of lack of wheat – a shipment of 36,000 tonnes is being held in a Mozambique port because the Government cannot pay for it. “Manufacturers are going to run out of stock to produce with,” the executive said. “There is a very strong possibility that food will disappear completely.”

At a commemoration last month of the 20th anniversary of the death of the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, author of The House of Hunger, the snacks comprised small squares of dry bread and glasses of water. Last week, another retail executive said, a Cabinet minister telephoned a supermarket chain manager and asked for beef. He offered to pay more than ten times the official price that he was instrumental in setting.

Schools reopened this week amid deep anxiety among parents of boarding pupils that their children will not be fed. Reports this week have said that prison authorities have stopped feeding prisoners and asked their relatives to bring food.

The conspicuously wealthy ruling party elite feels none of this. Joice Mu-juru, the Vice-President, has just seen her daughter married in celebrations that included chartering an Air Zimbabwe Boeing 737 for $10,000 (£5,000) to fly guests to a lavish ceremony at a five-star hotel at Victoria Falls.

Annual inflation in July, a month after the crackdown began, hit a record 7,600 per cent. Last week the value of the Zimbabwean dollar on the black market fell to a new low of £1 to Z$500,000. Mr Mugabe’s most recent act was to freeze wages and give new sweeping powers to the state commission that alone can sanction wage and price increases.

“We wonder on what planet President Mugabe lives,” said Wellington Chibebe, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. “He has never slept on an empty stomach, he has never walked from State House [his official residence] to his office, and he has never experienced water and electricity cuts.”

Cost of living

Z$30,000 Price of a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe, the equivalent of $120 at official exchange rate but $1.30 on the black market

Z$55,561 The cost of producing a loaf of bread

7,600% Current rate of inflation

450,000 Tons of wheat needed by Zimbabwe per year

78,000 Tons yielded by last year’s harvest

325,000 Tons yielded in 1990 harvest

80% Of Zimbabwe's population is estimated to be living below the poverty line

3.4m Zimbabweans (estimate) - one quarter of the population - have now fled the country

Sources: Wires, Bakers' Association of Zimbabwe, fas.usda.gov, CIA World Factbook, hungercentre.org

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