Facing a severe famine and a chronic shortage of fuel, Zimbabwe has made a desperate appeal to South Africa for help.
It wants South Africa to assist in the transport of famine relief and help fund oil purchases.
Zimbabwe has ordered enough food to stave off starvation, said Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare Minister July Moyo, but he asked South Africa to help speed the transportation of food from its ports to reach Zimbabwe's borders.
South Africa made it clear that it would consider a wide range of requests for assistance made at a two-day meeting of a bi-national commission that had not met for six years.
Zimbabwean Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge, who headed a group of Zimbabwean ministers who met their South African counterparts on Monday, rewarded South Africa's "quiet diplomacy" by stepping up bilateral contacts, and giving assurances that the era of land seizures was over.
The country's Land Minister Joseph Made said he had ordered that there should be no more land occupations by veterans.
Praising South Africa, Mudenge said: "President Thabo Mbeki has an effective policy of quiet diplomacy that works.
"The British decided to engage in megaphone diplomacy, so it is a long time since we sat with British ministers as we are now doing with the South African ministers."
Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said South Africa would attempt to repair relations between Zimbabwe and those countries that had imposed sanctions against it - the European Union, the United States and Australia.
Supporting a Zimbabwean call for Britain to compensate white Zimbabwean farmers stripped of their land, Dlamini-Zuma said South Africa would work with Zimbabwe to help farmers and farmworkers who had lost their jobs, as well as help those newly settled on land to farm productively.
Mudenge, insisting that human rights and democracy issues should not be mixed up with the need for compensation of white farmers, again called on Britain to meet its commitments under the Lancaster House agreement and compensate the farmers.
"Let's take the route of reason and try to persuade the British government to honour the agreement so that white farmers in Zimbabwe do not suffer the trauma they are going through," said Mudenge.
But a British government official said Britain would not pay compensation for what it called the "fast-track" land reforms carried out by the government of President Robert Mugabe over the past two years.
"While we are willing to help fund a properly constituted land reform programme approved by the UN Development Programme, we are not willing to fund the fast-track programme," said the official.
Dlamini-Zuma said it was time to put Zimbabwe's mistakes in the past and look to the future.
Mudenge was clearly relieved that Zimbabwe still had a friend in the world.
"When your neighbour is down, you don't drive a lorry over him," he said, referring to South Africa's quiet diplomacy. "You give him a hand so that he can get up." - Group Political Editor