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UN: Famine, low crop output in Zimbabwe same as last year
Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA)
June 24, 2004

Read the report on http://www.reliefweb.int

Harare (DPA) - Two United Nations reports this week estimate that Zimbabwe's current famine and poor crop production will be almost as bad as in 2003, contradicting assertions by President Robert Mugabe that no food aid was needed.

At least 2.3 million rural Zimbabweans will need famine relief, according to a report by the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee, made up of experts from the U.N., non-governmental organisations and the local ministry of agriculture.

A report by the same group issued six months ago estimated that 2.5 million urban Zimbabweans also needed food aid. According to one U.N. official, hunger in Zimbabwe "will probably be worse now, because prices of basic foodstuffs have continued to shoot up''.

The new figures bring the number expected to go hungry to 4.8 million, slightly less than the 5.5 million people that the World Food Programme, the U.N.'s famine relief arm, fed last year.

Also Thursday, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued a forecast that farmers in the country's communal farming areas would produce 866,330 tonnes of cereal grains.

It did not assess production in what is left of the country's predominantly white commercial farming areas and commercial farms seized by the government and resettled by blacks.

A spokesman for the Commercial Farmers' Union said its members would produce about 90,000 tonnes, and resettled farmers would probably produce "something less than that''.

This compares to the between 800,000 and 900,000 tonnes that used to be produced by now displaced white commercial farmers.

Last month Mugabe declared that a surplus harvest would be produced and that Zimbabweans "are not hungry''. His agriculture minister, Joseph Made, predicted a harvest of 2.8 million tonnes of cereals, of which 2.4 million tonnes would be maize, the country's staple.

There are widespread fears that the Mugabe government plans to use its control of food supplies from its own limited reserves and large imports to coerce votes for parliamentary elections scheduled for March next year.

The government has been adamant that it will not import food this year, but transport company and UN officials said that deliveries from abroad of at least 400,000 tonnes had begun to arrive in recent weeks. They said that more, possibly bigger, imports were to follow.

The International Monetary Fund has labelled Mugabe's land seizures as the major factor behind the collapse of the country's economy, the crumbling of infrastructure and widespread lawlessness.

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