Manwe, Zimbabwe—

At a food aid distribution point deep in rural Zimbabwe, Zanyiwe Ncube carefully pours her small portion of precious golden cooking oil into a plastic bottle with full concentration.

“I don’t want to lose a drop,” she said.

When aid workers gently revealed the news that this would be their last visit, she was relieved that the aid, paid for by the U.S. government, comes as her southern African country grapples with a severe drought.

Ncube and her 7-month-old son on her back were among 2,000 people receiving supplies of cooking oil, sorghum, peas and other supplies in the Manwe region of southwestern Zimbabwe. The food distribution is part of a program funded by U.S. aid agency USAID and run by the United Nations World Food Programme.

Their goal is to help some of the 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe who face the threat of hunger due to the drought that has gripped much of southern Africa since late 2023. Droughts have burned the crops that tens of millions of people grow and depend on for their own survival. To survive, it needs the help of the rainy season.

They are less and less dependent on crops and weather.

Drought has reached crisis levels in Zimbabwe, neighboring Zambia and Malawi. Zambia and Malawi have declared a state of disaster. Zimbabwe may be about to do the same. The drought has spread to Botswana and Angola in the west and Mozambique and Madagascar in the east.

A year ago, much of the region was inundated by deadly tropical storms and flooding. We’re in the midst of a vicious weather cycle: too much rain, then not enough. This is a story about climate extremes, which scientists say are becoming more frequent and more damaging, especially for the world’s most vulnerable people.

In Mangwe, young and old lined up to receive food, some pushing donkey carts to carry whatever they could get home, others pushing wheelbarrows. Those waiting their turn sat on the dusty ground. Nearby, a goat was trying its luck, nibbling at a patch of thorny, jagged brush.

Ncube, 39, now usually harvests crops – providing food for her, her two children and a niece she also cares for. Maybe there’s a little extra to sell.

Zimbabwe has experienced the driest February of its lifetime, bringing an end to the situation, according to seasonal monitoring by the World Food Programme.

“There is nothing in our fields, not even a grain,” she said. “Everything was burned (because of the drought).”

Unicef ​​said there are “overlapping crises” of extreme weather in eastern and southern Africa, with both regions experiencing a wave of storms, floods, heat and drought over the past year.

In southern Africa, Malawi has an estimated 9 million people in need, half of whom are children. UNICEF says more than 6 million people in Zambia, including 3 million children, are affected by drought. This accounts for almost half of the population of Malawi and 30% of the population of Zambia.

“It is depressing that extreme weather is expected to become the norm in East and Southern Africa in the coming years,” said Eva Kadilli, UNICEF regional director.

While human-caused climate change is causing more erratic weather around the world, southern Africa is facing other problems this year.

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon that warms parts of the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years and has varying effects on the world’s weather. In southern Africa, this means below-average rainfall and sometimes drought, which is blamed for the current situation.

The impact is even more severe for people in Mangwe, a region known for drought. Cereals sorghum and pearl millet are grown, which are drought-resistant and have a chance of yielding good harvests, but they too have failed to withstand the conditions this year.

Last year’s harvest was bad, but this year’s harvest is even worse, said Francesca Erdelman, the World Food Program’s country director in Zimbabwe. “This is not normal,” she said.

Traditionally, the first few months of the year are the “bad harvest months,” when families suffer from food shortages as they await a new harvest. However, there is little hope of restocking this year.

Joseph Nleya, a 77-year-old traditional leader in Manwe, said he could not remember the weather being so hot, so dry and so desperate. “There is no water in the dams, the river beds are dry and there are few boreholes. We depend on wild fruits, but they have also dried up,” he said.

He added that people were crossing illegally into Botswana in search of food and “hunger is turning hard-working people into criminals”.

Several aid agencies warned last year of the impending disaster.

Since then, Zambian President Hakande Hichilema said that 1 million hectares of the country’s staple corn crop of 2.2 million hectares had been destroyed. Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera appealed for $200 million in humanitarian aid.

The struggles of 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe do not tell the full story. The World Food Program’s Erdman said a nationwide crop assessment was underway and authorities were concerned about the results and that the number of people needing help could soar.

Millions of people in Zimbabwe, southern Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar will be unable to feed themselves until 2025 as this year’s harvests are written off. USAID’s Famine Early Warning System estimates that 20 million people in southern Africa will need food relief in 2025. The first few months of 2024.

Many people are unable to access this help because aid agencies have limited resources amid a global hunger crisis and governments cutting humanitarian funding.

When WFP officials last visited Mangue, Ncube was already calculating how long the food would last her. She said she hoped that period would be long enough to avoid her biggest fear: that her youngest child would fall into malnutrition before his first birthday.