In the village of Likupa, the vegetables have come up but the more vulnerable maize harvest - the staple for much of the mountain kingdom of Lesotho's 2.2 million people - has failed for lack of rain. "Around November or December we will run out of food," said 74-year old Tale Ramonebolu through an interpreter in the village, some 60 km (40 miles) south-west of the capital Maseru. He blames drought.
Last year, he had to sell one of his two cattle to buy food and, even though this means he cannot pull his two-cattle plough, he says he will have no choice but to sell the other cow when shortages return.
"After that, we will be forced to sell the furniture," he said. "But who will buy it because we are all affected in the same way."
Food shortages are not limited to Lesotho. Across southern Africa, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) estimates 2.8 million people in Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi will need emergency food handouts in the first half of 2005.
But some now question whether food aid does anything to address the underlying causes of famine in Africa, which appears to be becoming endemic in several parts of the continent.
Aid agencies and governments cite poor rains, economic decline and the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic as factors in producing a crisis that left 14 million southern Africans short of food in 2002 and which still endures in many areas today.
"We are worried that people will die if we do not get enough donations," said WFP Lesotho deputy country director Mads Lofvall.
Despite apocalyptic talk and periodic searches by western journalists for some "village of death", most of the population, even those who say they face food shortages, do not appear malnourished and supermarkets in the capital Maseru remain well-stocked with food imported from South Africa.
A lack of money to buy the food still leaves many reliant on handouts, or forced to adopt "coping mechanisms" such as crime, prostitution or, like the villagers of Likupa, selling much needed assets and pulling children from school.
Some aid workers say longer term programmes aimed at developing agriculture are as important as emergency food distribution.
In East Africa and the Horn of Africa, shortages in Ethiopia and Eritrea are if anything more serious, but again agencies say they are looking beyond the food aid programmes that do little beyond providing immediate respite.
"I think there is an increasing realisation that we have to address longer term solutions at the same time," Save the Children adviser Nisar Majid told Reuters from London.
"We're also doing a lot of research on cash based aid - giving cash instead of food. People can use it for other things such as buying livestock or health services."
In Likupa, the villagers say the problems began around a decade ago when the South African mines that employed Ramonebolu and most of his friends began laying off workers. Many Basotho - the term for the population of Lesotho - worked in the mines and sent money home while the women farmed the fields.
Now, some say they lack the money to buy food.
At the same time, the AIDS pandemic, estimated to affect almost a third of the population, is killing the young sexually active generation and further jeopardising food production.
Some fear that repeated food aid risks creating dependency, something the WFP says it is trying to avoid through targeting certain groups such as Lesotho's estimated 950,000 AIDS orphans and by running "food-for work" programmes.
"People talk about drought in Lesotho," said Peete Lerotholi, Lesotho rural livelihoods co-ordinator at aid agency Care International.
"In fact, if you look at the figures, you see that we get the same amount of rain in a drought year as in a normal year. It just falls at different times."
What is needed, he says, is projects that will harness this water through irrigation regardless of when it falls. At the same time, fields need to be protected so that torrential rains at the wrong time of year do not wash away the fertile soil.
Lerotholi says that in some villages in south-west Lesotho, which some experts says risks becoming a desert, projects aimed at improving farming techniques have boosted crop yields and are now selling surplus vegetables to Maseru.
"Food aid is not the answer," he said. "What we need is to look at longer term solutions."