Twenty million are said to be at risk across southern Africa – 3 million of them in Malawi – from a combination of drought, pestilence, war, corruption and famine. Instead, I found a government locked in a constitutional row about the re-election of the President for a third term and an aid community bemused by the international focus on the country and unsure how to respond to itMalawi is hungry and many of its people are desperately so but it is not starving – not yet. Veterans of the “scorched earth” famines of Ethiopia in 1984 and the Sudan in 1990 insist nothing on that scale has been seen so far in Malawi. Senior executives of the aid agencies in Britain, who have launched disaster appeals to raise funds for southern Africa, are privately worried that this scepticism from professionals on the ground will undermine their efforts.The chief executive of a British-based charity told me last week: “I am confident we can persuade the public to give now to stave off the crisis that will otherwise come in November but if the people out there start questioning our efforts that could be very damaging.”I spent 10 days touring Malawi, visiting hospital malnutrition clinics and villages in the bush where crops have failed and I saw many children with the dry hair, puffy hands and feet and protruding bellies that are the signs of malnutrition. I saw sick elderly grandparents who face a daily struggle to find food for young children whose parents are dead, victims of Aids. I met villagers whose crops had been stolen because the price of maize, the staple food, is rising and the hungry are growing more desperate.

I saw homes preparing maize husks – the “hunger food” made from the chaff around the grain normally fed to chickens but used in lean years to tide over families to the next harvest.But the hunger is not universal. Even in the same village, some have enough and others do not Moreover, hunger is an annual phenomenon. According to the Demographic and Health Survey 2000, published by the Malawian National Statistics Office, severe malnourishment affects 26 per cent of under-fives in rural areas and 13 per cent in urban areas – the result of years of food shortages.Hunger, disease and poverty exact an annual cull of the population in Malawi. The difference this year is that the cull has started early, in May and June, which should be a time of plenty. At Mulanje mission hospital in the south, 900 children were seen in the malnutrition clinic in May, a record for that month, when the numbers should be falling.At Chitambi, a large village of 50 houses four miles from the Mulanje-Blantyre road, people were forced to bring in their crops early this year partly out of hunger and partly to protect them from thieves. Agnes Renard was drying maize husks outside her home and several houses had mats of millet drying, normally used for brewing beer but used as a substitute food when maize is short.The village chief, an elderly, frail man wearing a double- breasted blue jacket and brown trousers rolled to the knee, had planted a small plot of maize in front of his house, instead of in the fields, so he could guard it from thieves “I only depend on God Whatever God prepares I accept.

Only God knows the future,” he said.To some, this fatalism can seem exasperating. If you are starving what should you do? Sit and wait for death, at God’s convenience, or go and search for food elsewhere? Malawi has one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world with water for crops and an abundance of fish. Why not move to the lake?But this is to misunderstand the predicament Where life is hard, communities learn to endure Stoicism is their strength. They have no resources, no savings, nothing with which to pay for a fishing net or seed or fertiliser or transport to enable them to start again. Yet they remain cheerful and dignified, not gloomy and downcast, laughing in the face of hardship That is the African miracle. Those that have little, share even the little that they have They move slowly and work little, conserving energy. But they survive.I asked Grace Malenga, head of the Moyoh House malnutrition clinic at Queen Elizabeth hospital, Blantyre, to gauge the position.