By Martin Bell Former BBC correspondent and ex-British MP

Imagine a country of 11.5 million where more than half the inhabitants are children.

Where the average life expectancy is just 39, where half a million have died from Aids and there are a million Aids orphans.

Unfortunately, you do not have to imagine such a country. It already exists. It is Malawi today.

On top of all that, this small African nation is facing a crop failure on a scale not known since 1949.

It has not affected Malawi alone.

Severe food shortages are also threatening the populations of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Lesotho.

But the crisis is nowhere more acute than in Malawi.

	:	Southern Africa famine
In pictures: Southern Africa famine

It was caused by floods which swept away the newly planted maize last winter, followed by a drought which reduced the harvest last March to a fraction of what the people need to survive.

Unicef, the UN Children's Fund, believes that three million of them are at risk. 200,000 tons of emergency food aid will be required by October at the latest, and only a small proportion of this has been pledged so far.

Baby sale

I travelled with a Unicef team to a drought-affected area near Kasungu in the centre of the country. In the first village that we came to, a community of just 30 people, two had already died of malnutrition; and the same number in the next village.

The survivors showed us the graves and told us they hardly had the strength to bury the dead. I was invited as a Unicef representative to attend the funeral of a man who had died the day before of illness brought on by starvation.

Too many mouths to feed

The symptoms were familiar - swelling, chest pains, and then death. Village chiefs said they had received no aid and been promised none. They urged me to tell the world of their plight.

People at the moment are getting by on the small amounts of maize they salvaged from the failed harvest, and on husks that would be used as chicken feed in a normal season.

In one field, among the dead stalks of maize we found them harvesting the only crop they could find - field mice.

They were digging for the mice to feed their families, or to sell to others. A stick of salted mice was on sale for the equivalent of $1.50.

Eating mice

The individual tragedies are multiplying.

One man, with virtually no food remaining, was responsible for his own three children, and 13 others he had taken on from family members who had died of Aids and starvation.

People beg outside food stores

A Malawian social worker told us of a couple who had sold their baby for just under $5 so they would have one fewer mouth to feed, and a better chance of keeping their remaining children alive.

Time is short. Aid agencies are aware of the gravity of the problem, but have not yet been able to translate their hopes into plans of action.

Unless the food can be transported to Malawi in an emergency road and rail operation in the next few weeks, tens of thousands will starve to death.