ZHULUBE, Zimbabwe — Hundreds of bags of cornmeal were stacked in front of a bar near Zhulube this month, rising as high as its roof. The only problem for the hungry people of the drought-stricken area was that the food, like the bar, was controlled by officials from the ruling party. With a key election nearing, they weren't about to give it to just anyone.

The officials first held a rally by their impressive mound of food, witnesses said. The next day, as hundreds of people from surrounding villages gathered to collect the 110-pound bags they had ordered and paid for months before, ruling party officials said only their supporters were eligible.

When the names of opposition voters were called, they were handed back their money, according to several people who were turned away. The leftover bags went on sale hours later for twice the price.

Human-rights reports said that withholding food from opponents is nothing new for the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, the party of President Robert Mugabe. But this year, the threat of starvation is creating a potentially potent backlash against ZANU-PF.

Many people in Zhulube, a tiny, impoverished village in southern Zimbabwe, said their votes in tomorrow's national parliamentary elections will be based less on their immediate food needs than on which party offers the best chance to reverse Zimbabwe's five-year economic decline and end recurrent food shortages. Opposition-party leaders said the issue might represent their best chance to make inroads into Mugabe's traditionally strong rural support.

Among those in Zhulube who went home empty-handed March 19 was Thenji Matema, 48, a lean and soft-spoken widow supporting a daughter and four grandchildren on the roughly $25 she earns each month selling mats she weaves by hand. Matema said she walked away doubly determined to vote for the opposition, even if she must drink tea to curb her hunger before her one daily meal and serve meat to her family only once a week.

"It's better I suffer than vote for ZANU-PF," Matema said.

Mugabe's party has manipulated voter rolls and is likely to send the politically loyal military to oversee polling stations and ballot counting, human-rights groups said. Even the most enthusiastic opposition activists said this rigging makes outright victory for the opposition unlikely in the election.

Mugabe can neutralize all but a landslide win for the opposition because he directly appoints 30 of the 150 seats in Parliament. His current six-year term lasts through 2008.

But if a single issue dominates political discussions this election season, at least among ordinary people, it is the growing problem of hunger, as evidenced by the thousands of acres of wilted corn plants that can be seen across a country once regarded as southern Africa's breadbasket. International groups that monitor famine said nearly half of Zimbabwe's 12 million people might need food in coming months.

The nation's food crisis, however, barely rates a mention in the state media's election coverage.

Instead, a campaign tightly controlled by ZANU-PF has focused on leadership. Not that of Mugabe, but of the prime minister of a country thousands of miles away: Britain's Tony Blair.

"Bury Blair, vote ZANU-PF," run the ruling party's newspaper advertisements, promising "an end to racist factory closures, an end to racist withholding of commodities," along with a litany of other domestic problems blamed on the British leader. Mugabe is furious with the country's former colonial power, Britain, especially after Blair said he would like to see a change of leadership in Zimbabwe.

Indeed, Mugabe has dubbed this year's elections "anti-Blair elections" and accused the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) of fronting Western interests.

Opposition leaders and rights activists said that the government underpinned its anti-Blair election campaign with threats that play on fears sparked by the food crisis. They said the government has threatened to bypass areas that fail to support ZANU-PF when the government distributes food after the elections.

"Every time you turn on the television, you hear about how bad Tony Blair is. People are taking it as a joke. There's no strong anti-British sentiment," said one black supervisor at a large factory in Bulawayo who would give his name only as Jack.

But he said there was plenty of anxiety about food. He said his elderly mother in a rural district in central Zimbabwe and his three children at school in Bulawayo had all been warned that those who supported the opposition MDC could miss out on food.

Hunger has become a central rallying point for the MDC, which features images of green, fertile fields and well-stocked grocery shelves in its television ads.

A victory, MDC members said, would allow Zimbabwe to rapidly repair relations with the United States and other countries, and food assistance and a resumption of foreign investment would quickly follow.

Less than a year ago, Mugabe boasted of a bumper harvest to come and ordered international food donors to cease general feeding programs in what many political analysts in Zimbabwe regarded as an attempt to gain control of all food stocks before the election. In a rare interview with an international news organization in May, he told Britain's Sky News, "We are not hungry. ... Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked. We have enough."

But Zimbabwe, already suffering food-production declines after the seizures of white-owned commercial farms beginning in 2000, was soon hit by a drought, one that has hobbled food production in neighboring Zambia and Botswana.

Farmers who grow food on small patches of land suddenly faced a near-total loss of their staple crop, corn, which is milled into a fine grist and boiled into a stiff mush that is central to Zimbabweans' daily diet.

Mugabe has belatedly acknowledged the drought and food shortage, telling supporters at campaign rallies that he will prevent mass starvation by importing food from neighboring South Africa, where modern irrigation systems make farms resistant to drought.

In state-owned newspapers, top ruling-party officials in Zimbabwe have called reports that they are using food as an election tool "completely unsubstantiated and untrue."

Such reports have been widespread for many years, detailed in accounts by independent journalists and such groups as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube, a leading critic of Mugabe in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city, said using food as a weapon was common throughout the country this election year, as it was in 2000 and 2002. "They are totally corrupt, and they will use anything to protect their power," he said, referring to the ruling party.

In Zhulube, Asa Sibanda, 82, said her refusal to support ZANU-PF had cut her off for years from food reserves controlled by the government and the party.

Instead, she supports herself, five orphaned grandchildren and one great-grandchild by selling chickens and getting occasional gifts of cornmeal from her son, who lives nearby. Her total income, she said, is a few dollars each month.

Sibanda said some people in her village would vote for the ruling party out of fear that government food will otherwise be withheld. "Most people, they are not voting for ZANU-PF, but they are voting for food," she said.

Material from the Los Angeles Times and Reuters is included in this report.