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Zimbabweans
teeter on edge of starvation
Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times
December 19, 2007
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004061387_zim09.html
Lupane - Jane Sibanda
waits until the hunger claws her insides and she is so dizzy with
lack of food that she can barely stand it. Then, ashamed, the 70-year-old
forces herself to beg for food from other villagers, who are close
to starving themselves. "I take a few days, postponing and
postponing. I put it off until I feel my body can't take it anymore,"
said Sibanda, describing how she feels after a week surviving only
on wild fruit from the bush near her home a few miles from Lupane
in southern Zimbabwe. When Sibanda appeared at her door, neighbor
Beby Ndebele felt desperate because she did not have enough mealie
meal, as Zimbabwe's cornmeal staple is known, to give. But she couldn't
bear to eat while her elderly neighbor starved, so somehow she scraped
up a small bowl. Sibanda, who remembers a time when she owned plenty
of cattle and was a burden to no one, vowed to make it last a week.
As the government of
President Robert Mugabe proclaims plans for the "Mother of
All Harvests" this planting season, many rural Zimbabweans
are teetering on the edge of starvation. And despite predictions
of a good rain for planting after last year's drought and failed
harvest, Zimbabwe's economic chaos has left the country with an
acute shortage of seeds. Just a few years ago, Zimbabwe was the
breadbasket of southern Africa, exporting grain to its less-blessed
neighbors. But in 2000 Mugabe began seizing thousands of mainly
white-owned commercial farms, and dismantling the inequitable pattern
of ownership under the racist regime of Ian Smith. Some analysts,
however, argue that the real motive was to share the spoils of power
with his political cronies. Government ministers, security officials
and ruling party cronies grabbed the land and ran farms into the
ground.
The national harvest
plummeted. Production of maize collapsed by 74 percent from 1999
to 2004, according to the Center for Global Development in Washington,
D.C., an independent think tank. Now, around a third of the population
depends on humanitarian food aid. Just as the regime plays favorites
in awarding farms to friends of the government, it plays favorites
when distributing food. For hungry village people struggling to
find food, the threat of starvation is terrifying. With the presidential
election due next year, there are reports that the state-run Grain
Marketing Board, the monopoly distributor of maize, is selling only
to ruling party supporters or siphoning maize to party officials,
police and bureaucrats who resell on the black market at inflated
prices. But the biggest problem, according to human-rights organizations
monitoring hunger, is that the grain board is distributing very
little maize at all in many rural areas.
Food has often
been used as a political lever in Zimbabwe, particularly in the
run-up to elections, but this year the impact is severe because
of the drought last year and the fact that shops across the country
are virtually empty. The only cushion against political manipulation
of maize is international humanitarian aid, but the World Food Program
and other agencies target only the thin layer of most vulnerable,
leaving many, like Jane Sibanda, in desperate hunger. In the southern
village of Mzola, a dozen young Mugabe supporters recently seized
all the government maize, which should have been destined for 175
families, according to locals interviewed by the Los Angeles Times.
The hunger problem is not limited to rural areas. In Killarney,
a slum suburb of Bulawayo, families are dependent on intermittent
aid from local churches, but go hungry when the churches have no
food to give. Most are people who lost their homes two years ago
during "Operation
Murambatsvina," or "Clean out the Filth," when
the Mugabe regime razed thousands of shacks, leaving at least 750,000
homeless.
Traveling the roads of
Zimbabwe, the impact of the country's economic crisis is obvious,
particularly in Zimbabwe's Binga district, one of the poorest areas
of the country. The landscape is red and dusty, with not a blade
of green grass. Passing through one village, scores of listless
people wait in the heat for a rumored arrival of government maize.
They had waited all day the previous day too. At a home for orphans
in the town of Nkayi, the children sleep on bare concrete floors
without mattresses. The pantry had two moldy cabbages and a small
bag of mealie meal when the Times visited early this month, not
enough for a single meal for the 35 children. Yet locals have seen
bags of maize stacked high in a local policeman's house.
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