As early as 4am in the morning and many Malawians are already stumble and queued for hours. These lines become warse when the sun is trying to shine on them, they Queue on empty stomachs and with bare feet scotched on the hot sun.

Most of Mothers who are breast feeding their children has theire milk dried up due to lack of food capable for milk production in human,There they stand with their little babies some of 3 months and some with little ones of about 2 weeks old there they stand, stand there on bare sun light with their children,their babies strapped to their backs with an old and torn cotton cloth in the traditional African way.

Occasionally a scuffle breaks out as some hungry person, accused of pushing in, is plucked from the queue by police officers.

These are Malawi's poorest people - unable to buy maize on the open market where prices have doubled in recent months. Stocks in the main government markets are diminishing fast, so they're starting to impose rations.

What is making matters worse is HIV/Aids. One in seven people in Malawi is affected and it is fuelling the problem of extreme hunger.

Money that households would normally spend on buying seed and fertiliser, is being spent on transporting the sick to hospital and buying basic medicine instead.

Malawians, particularly in the parched south of the country, are well used to hardship, but their ability to cope is being severely eroded.

Sixty thousand tonnes of maize is being brought in by the Malawian government. The aim is to distribute it in the coming months.

But it is only a stop-gap measure for the most vulnerable, and Malawi's ministers are reluctantly having to turn to the richer world for help.

The real challenge facing Malawi is how to replenish home-grown stocks.

Aid agencies are trying to distribute seed and fertiliser ahead of the planting season, which is approaching rapidly, but contributions to the UN's emergency relief fund have been miserably low.

Only $27m (£15m) out of the $88m (£50m) appealed for has been committed by the international community so far.

The frightening reality is that if no seeds are planted now, the squeeze on food supplies now could rapidly escalate into a major humanitarian crisis.

And hunger is already causing heartbreak. Admissions to specialist therapeutic feeding units, which nurse malnourished children back to health, are up a third on last year - and desperate people are being forced to take desperate measures.

In a small village in Mulanje district on a certain family of Berita Chimtengo. She is a mother mourning her son. That is in two weeks ago, her son Benito went out foraging for food. He brought home wild yams for the family to eat
What Benito didn't realise were that they were poisonous. The young man fell unconscious and very quickly died and 11 other members of his family, the majority of them young children, were violently sick.

Berita said that she is now terrified every time her children went out hunting for food, but what can you do she told me, when you simply don't have anything to eat.

In other surrounding villages there are families with similar stories to tell. And aid agencies fear that without massively increased help in the coming weeks, the tragedies these families have faced could be just the tip of the iceberg.