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UN says Zimbabwe has suffered massive de-industrialisation
ZimOnline
June 21, 2006

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/KHII-6QZ3JW?OpenDocument&rc=1&cc=zwe

JOHANNESBURG - Zimbabwe has suffered large-scale de-industrialisation since 1995 that has condemned the bulk of the population to a grinding subsistence life as communal and resettlement farmers, according to the latest United Nations (UN) poverty assessment report on the country.

The report on poverty and economic activity in Zimbabwe between 1995 and 2003 was compiled by the United Nations Development Programme office in Harare. It will first be presented to President Robert Mugabe's Cabinet this week or next week before it is made public.

But ZimOnline was yesterday shown an advance copy of the report that reveals shocking levels of poverty and human suffering in the southern African country, effectively debunking claims by Mugabe and his government that they are on top of the situation and that Zimbabwe is on a path to economic recovery.

"Since 1995 Zimbabwe has experienced a process of de-industrialisation with the large majority (of the people) becoming largely dependent on communal and resettlement agriculture, a sector where there is high poverty prevalence," the report reads in part.

All facets of the crisis-sapped country's industrial and commercial sectors had declined drastically over the period under review leaving only agriculture - and most of it at subsistence level - as the main economic activity.

For example, the manufacturing sector, a vital cog of the economy, declined from employing 10 percent of labour to employing only four percent. The services industry shed jobs leaving it employing nine percent of labour from the 19 percent it employed before 1995.

Wholesale, retail, hotel and restaurant operators slowed down operations to employ percent of labour from the seven percent in their employment prior to 1995. Likewise the mining sector declined from accounting for five percent of employed labour to only three percent, according to the report.

It was not possible to immediately get comment on the report from Mugabe's press secretary George Charamba or from Labour and Social Welfare Minister Nicholas Goche.

United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator in Harare, Agostinho Zacarias, was also not available for comment on the matter.

But the report says only agriculture grew as an employer with 60 percent of labour employed in the farming sector up from 29 before 1995. The growth in agriculture was chiefly because of Mugabe's chaotic and often violent seizure of land from whites for redistribution to landless black peasants.

The farm seizures that triggered a flight of foreign investors and capital from Zimbabwe are blamed for plunging the country into food shortages and for quickening the demise of an economy that was one of the most vibrant in Africa when Mugabe took over at independence from Britain in 1980.

The report says while Mugabe's land reforms appear to have increased employment in the agricultural sector, in reality the reforms failed to alleviate poverty with the majority of those allocated land seized from productive white farmers failing to utilise it resulting in widespread hunger and economic hardships.

Critics of Mugabe's land reforms insist that the about 60 percent drop in food production that followed land redistribution was chiefly because the 82-year old President failed to back up newly resettled black farmers with inputs support and skills training to maintain production on the former white farms.

The report says: "A higher proportion of the households in the resettlement areas (70 percent) did not cultivate their whole pieces of land, followed by communal areas (69 percent)."

In perhaps the most vivid illustration of the extent of desperation and human suffering in Zimbabwe, the UN report says as a coping mechanism at least 50 percent of families were having to skip some meals in order to save on the little food available.

"The most significant coping mechanism which households were employing to mitigate the effects of food shortages included: skipping meals (50 percent), eating less preferred meals (18 percent), and food from donors/NGOs (12 percent)," reads the report.

Zimbabwe is grappling a severe economic crisis whose genesis can be traced to 1995/96 after the collapse of economic structural reforms that the erstwhile socialist Mugabe had reluctantly embraced in 1991 at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western governments.

The economic crisis gathered pace after the IMF withdrew balance-of-payments support to Zimbabwe in 1999 over differences with Mugabe on fiscal policy and other governance issues.

Mugabe's farm seizures that he began a year after the IMF withdrew financial support cancelled whatever hopes of a quick turn around of Zimbabwe's declining economy.

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