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UN team ordered out of Zimbabwe
Peta Thornycroft, VOA
Harare
May 07, 2004

Harare - The Zimbabwe government has ordered a United Nations crop assessment team to leave the country three days after it went into the fields to calculate the annual food harvest. The government gave the U-N no specific reason for its decision.

Neither U-N nor Zimbabwe government officials qualified to speak on food supply would say why. But, President Robert Mugabe's government this week asked the U-N team conducting an annual crop assessment to stop and leave the country. The team of assessors, made up of three experts from the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization, had been invited to come.

Brian Kagoro, co-chairman of pressure group, the Crisis Coalition, said Friday the likely reason is that the government appears to want to, in his words, "perpetuate the myth" that Zimbabwe had enough grain for next year, and that its land reform program is working.

But he warned a potential humanitarian catastrophe lay ahead, as most of the arable land seized from white commercial farmers over the last four years is now fallow.

For more than two years, Zimbabwe, once a food exporter, has been unable to produce enough food and relied on Western donors to feed as many as five million people.

The Zimbabwe government told a regional food security organization last month it will not ask for food aid this year because it has enough domestically produced grain on hand and will import any deficit. The government has made no such statement directly to the United Nations or donor governments.

Sources within the donor community said the U-N crop assessment team had not seen enough to be able to make any accurate predictions about food availability before the next harvest in 2005.

But private sector food experts and Western donors estimate the government, in the worst-case scenario, will have to import up to 900-thousand tons of grain before the next harvest.

The Zimbabwe government's food aid distribution system has been widely criticized as being politicized. Human rights organizations and opposition supporters have accused the government of providing food only to supporters of the ruling Zanu-P-F party.

Meanwhile, the World Food Program is scaling down its operations in Zimbabwe, and its officials say they are not certain whether they will be back in the fall, when the country is expected to experience food shortages, or whether they are leaving for good.

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