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New bread shortages in Zimbabwe, Internet services near collapse
Associated Press (AP)
September 19, 2006

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=15162

Harare - Long suffering Zimbabweans hunted for bread in shops Monday during a government clampdown against bakers accused of overcharging. Also Monday, most international e-mail and Internet services neared collapse after the state communications company failed to pay its hard currency satellite charges and the nation's key Intelsat link was cut off. Stores reported a halt to bread deliveries Monday after the arrest of three food company executives by police acting for trade ministry price inspectors. The executives, one from Harare's biggest private bakery, were accused of hiking prices on bread and dairy goods in defiance of government-controlled pricing. The price of a regular loaf of bread rose by 30 percent Friday to 330 Zimbabwe dollars, the fifth increase this year. Bakers insisted flour shortages and soaring costs of ingredients, transport and packaging in the ailing economy forced them to exceed the government's fixed price to continue production. Price inspectors ordered stores to reduce the bread price Monday and deliveries dried up, store managers said.

The independent Internet Service Providers Association, meanwhile, apologized to customers for a drastic reduction in browsing speeds and long delays in e-mail deliveries Monday. It said Zimbabwe's biggest international link through Intelsat, controlled by the state communications company, TelOne, was shut down until debts of at least US$700,000 in service charges were paid off. The Internet association said the country's main service providers reported a drop of up to 90 percent in the volume of electronic traffic in the past week because of the Intelsat shutdown. The state company TelOne acknowledged receiving a final demand for payment of its satellite arrears last month and asked the central bank to provide hard currency which has so far not been allocated. "This is catastrophic as all legal Internet Service Providers utilize TelOne for their outgoing bandwidth to the World Wide Web as well as for e-mail traffic. Thus all such ISPs have and are being affected by this downtime. In short, this ... is causing an almost collapse of the Internet in Zimbabwe," said Mweb, the country's biggest provider, in a circular to subscribers. Zimbabwe is suffering its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, with acute shortages of food, hard currency, gasoline and essential imports. Official annual inflation is a record 1,204 percent, the highest in the world.

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