FAMINE STRICKEN

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 85, 10 April 1943, Page 4

FAMINE STRICKEN

AGONY OF CHINESE OVER 2,000,000 DEAD CHUNGKING, April 5. Famine has killed 2,000,000 people in the Chinese Province of Honan since last October, writes Selwyn Speight, Sydney Morning Herald war correspondent. At least 2,000,000 more will die in the next two months in a countryside green with young wheat, which will ripen too late to save them. Existing means of transport cannot make sufficient food available to support the starving population. Terrible stories are coming out of Honan. Relief workers describe streams of people in the last stages of hunger and exhaustion still pushing west out of the stricken areas. About 3,000,000 have gone already, mostly into the adjoining province of Shensi. Daily, trains are running to Shensi, bringing out thousands more, packed in carriages, trucks, and old vans, and clinging to the roofs and sides. Another human river pours along roads and tracks. Countless families are travelling as the Chinese in extremity always do—the father pushing a wheelbarrow which carries the youngest baby and the family's possessions, the mother helping by pulling a rope, and children, even those barely able to walk, keeping pace alongside. Villages Deserted The old and weak sometimes fall from trains and give up the struggle beside the track. There are many unburied dead and abandoned babies. The greater part of Honan Province shows the shattering effect of the famine. Many villages are almost deserted. Houses are closed and shuttered. Sometimes shrieking men and women pursue travellers, but mostly there is silence. Thousands of farms are deserted. The farmers planted their wheat and hung on as long'as they could, eating their ploughing oxen, roots, grass and weeds. Finally, they had to go. Trees along roadways gleam white. They have been stripped of all their bark, which has gone as food. In the bigger towns swarms of beggars follow every stranger and anyone else who seems well fed going on their knees to beg for their lives. In May, the human tide will turn and some farmers at least will return to their homes to reap their crops But the economy of th* whole area has suffered a blow from which even in normal times it would take years to recover.