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Hunger
strikes the rural areas
IRIN News
April
24, 2007
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=71786
GOROMONZI -
Back-to-back dry years have drastically reduced Zimbabwe's crop
yields, causing widespread hunger in rural communities, where residents
are calling for immediate food aid.
President Robert
Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF government has already labelled 2007 a 'Year
of Drought', and Denford Chimbwanda, president of the Grain and
Cereal Producers Association (GCPA), told IRIN that this year's
harvest prospects were grim.
"This situation
is worse than last year, even though the past season was also affected
by drought. While some areas have done relatively well, the majority
of the land that was put under cereals are write-offs," Chimbwanda
said.
The landscape
is a dire picture of dusty maize fields, shrivelled before the tasselling
stage, and villagers with little option other than to let cattle
graze among the dry stalks at a time when they were expecting to
gather the harvest ahead of the winter months.
In the district
of Goromonzi, about 60km southeast of the capital, Harare, in Mashonaland
East Province, Juru village resident, Theresa Mapara, 47, a home-based
caregiver who assists HIV/AIDS patients, said, "Most of the time
at night I weep to realise that my efforts to make these patients'
lives more bearable are being rendered useless because of lack of
food."
Mapara, who
visits each of her 10 patients three times a week, said "Of course,
being in a rural area that is poverty-stricken and does not have
adequate medical facilities, we have to contend with a perennial
shortage of drugs, but when that is coupled with a severe scarcity
of food, the nutritional situation of the patients suffers, and
there is hardly much we can do to save their lives."
She and her
husband, who is employed as a cross-border truck driver, have sufficient
food reserves, but Mapara often dips into them to feed her critical
patients when donor food is unavailable.
One of her patients,
a 30-year-old carpenter who declined to be identified, sold his
last goat last week to buy food for his two children as well life-prolonging
antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for himself, which cost about Z$250,000
(US$10 at the parallel market rate) per month.
Zimbabwe's official
rate of inflation rate is now over 1,700 percent, although independent
economists estimate that it has crossed the 2,000 percent threshold,
which means the Z$500,000 (US$20) he realised from the sale of the
goat has already been spent.
The carpenter
bought a 50kg bag of maize for Z$110,000 (US$4.40), a 2 litre bottle
of cooking oil for Z$60,000 (US$2.40) and a 2kg packet of sugar
for Z$30,000 (US$1.2), with the remainder being used to purchase
his medicine.
The family eats
two meals a day, usually black tea and thick maizemeal porridge
in the mornings, and vegetables in the evenings.
In the past,
Mapara said, villagers needing food assistance would be helped by
the Zunde Ramambo, a communal rogramme in which residents participate
in growing crops on common land, whose custodian is the local chief,
but because of the drought no food relief was expected from this
traditional coping mechanism.
A volunteer,
affiliated to the Zimbabwe
Red Cross Society in Goromonzi and speaking on condition of
anonymity, said the donor community should provide immediate food
aid to villagers in the region to ward off starvation.
"It is most
likely that many people will die, not because of disease alone but
[of] starvation as well, if donors and the government don't come
in quickly," she told IRIN.
It is estimated
that the country will produce about 600,000mt of cereals in the
2006-07 farming season, but the annual requirement is 1.8mt. Although
the government has played down food shortages in the past, it recently
invited the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organisation
to assess the food security situation in Zimbabwe.
The invitation
to the two international bodies coincided with a threat made at
a government rally in Matabeleland by the information minister,
Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, to cancel the licences of all nongovernmental
organisations (NGOs), so as to sieve out those with political agendas.
Ndlovu told
The Herald, a government newspaper, that the country was facing
"a severe drought this year" and would welcome unconditional food
aid. He also divulged that maize was already being imported.
The National
Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (NANGO), which
represents more than 1,000 civil groups in Zimbabwe, said it had
received no official warning from the government about the cancellation
of NGO licences, but said the move would be ill-advised because
there was a burgeoning humanitarian crisis.
Domboshawa village,
about 30km from Harare, in Mashonaland East Province, and Musana
District, about 80km from the capital in Mashonaland West Province,
were areas that used to produce food even in times of drought, but
crops have failed to survive the relentless lack of rain and villagers
there are now calling for immediate assistance.
"We spent a
lot of money preparing the fields and planting but our sweat has
come to nought," Petra-Anna Chingwena and her husband, Peter, told
IRIN in Domboshawa, where they planted 10 acres of maize. "We heeded
the advice of weather experts to plant with the first rains that
came in late November [2006] but after two weeks of heavy showers
it became dry, and there was nothing we could do to rescue the crop."
The Chingwenas
are subsistence farmers who depend almost entirely on their land
to sustain themselves and their five school-going children, but
are now struggling to raise money to buy food and to pay school
fees.
The husband
earns a little extra income as a cattle herder on larger neighbouring
farms, but it is not enough to provide for the family's needs. If
the drought breaks in the coming season, the Chingwenas will find
it hard to till the land because they have had to sell two of their
four cattle and their only donkey to cover the medical costs of
one of their children, who fell seriously ill.
In Musana District,
villagers said the political leadership in the area, a stronghold
of the ruling party, had advised them to form 'food-for-work' brigades
that would combat erosion and repair roads in return for food handouts.
"The idea is
noble but our problem is that it might take too long, and people
will die of hunger. We are not cry-babies who would always call
for help when we are in need, but the situation this year is so
bad, and if food aid takes a month or two without coming, a real
disaster is looming," Kundiziva Motsi, 56, told IRIN.
He said the
able-bodied were trekking to the nearby Shamva area to dig for gold
illegally, but not everyone could make a living from such a strenuous
and dangerous activity.
"In this area
there are so many families whose parents have died, and young children
have been left to look after their brothers and sisters," said Motsi.
"Naturally, such households don't have the capacity to produce food,
and you can imagine what the situation is like when there is drought,
like now."
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