Back to Index

Another famine looms countrywide
Shame Makoshori,The Financial Gazette (Zimbabwe)
April 23, 2008

http://www.fingaz.co.zw/story.aspx?stid=2671

The country is facing another potentially devastating food crisis amid indications that agricultural input shortages, as well as excessive rains, which ravaged the country this year, had significantly reduced yields.

The situation has the potential to plunge the country further down the economic abyss, as government would be forced to buy scarce foreign currency from the parallel market to mobilize resources for imports to meet production shortfalls.

The shortages could also plunge close to three million people into starvation should donors fail to intensify their relief programmes in the country.

The United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP) has already indicated that it could scale down supplies into the country, although a senior official with the Programme's Johannesburg office said this week the agency hoped that harvests would start trickling into the market this month and ameliorate the current food deficit.

An assessment made by The Financial Gazette indicates that the country's food situation remains precarious although the government has said it would continue to import food to avert a major famine after heavy rains and, later, high temperatures, destroyed crops in a season that was also dealt a heavy blow by poor preparations.

Zimbabwe requires about 1,8 million tonnes of maize to meet its national food requirement.

Sweden last month described the "food situation" in Zimbabwe as catastrophic.

"The humanitarian situation is still very serious and there are few signs of an improvement in the near future," said Swedish ambassador to Zimbabwe Sten Rylander.

With Zimbabwe's economic crisis deepening following disputed polls, there are no signs that the government would be able to raise the foreign currency to import enough food, fuel, medicine and other key requirements.

South Africa's Business Report this week quoted WFP regional manager for east and southern Africa Marcus Prior saying early indications were that this year's harvest might be lower than expected due to insufficient inputs, in particular fertilizer, and floods.

However, Prior said it was too early to give an accurate assessment of the harvest, and far too early to say whether WFP would have to scale up its operations later in the year.

During a countrywide tour of farming communities by The Financial Gazette's news crews, it was clear that food aid was critical to avert another crisis after the bulk of the current crop failed.

In Mashonaland West, Zvimba communal lands was in a dire situation, with villagers saying they were haunted by the prospects of another famine at a time when their meager earnings were fast depreciating due to galloping inflation, now at 165 000 percent.

They blamed shoddy preparations for the poor crop yields.

Too much rain during the first half of the season, and a severe dry spell towards the end of the season, were the major drivers of the crop failures, the villagers told The Financial Gazette.

In Manicaland province, our news crew witnessed vast areas of under-cultivated land and crop failures on land that had been planted due to lack of fertilizer and other inputs.

Here, villagers had already started resorting to gold panning to eke out a living.

In Mhondoro in Mashonaland West, villagers told The Financial Gazette they were facing starvation.

Erratic rain patterns had militated against their labor on the fields, they said.

The Financial Gazette's Political Editor Njabulo Ncube, who assessed the food situation in Masvingo, said along the Harare-Masvingo road, the farms were derelict, with little sign of activity last month.

"With the country approaching the winter, one would expect farmers to be preparing for the winter wheat but there is no activity," said Ncube.

A Financial Gazette crew that visited Chipinge, also came back with a grim report of the situation.

The WFP official told Business Report that about 300 000 Zimbabweans would be supported this month, compared to about 2,4 million who received WFP support in the last few months. From next month, through the programme's relief and recovery operation, WFP expected to raise this figure again to 825 000 people each year for the next two years, but the operation would "seasonally expand its assistance" to cover as many as one million highly vulnerable people "if they are affected by crop failure", said Prior.

Business Report said the programme had reported that despite political tension in Zimbabwe, supply routes had not been disrupted.

Food was procured from Zambia, Malawi, South Africa and Mozambique for the WFP operation in Zimbabwe "and moved into the country by road". He said: "There have not been any problems moving food into Zimbabwe," the report indicated.

The WFP had no reports of any of its distributions being disrupted over the past few weeks. Richard Lee, of the WFP information office in Johannesburg, said in a statement that the UN agency had completed food distributions last month, earlier than usual, to avoid any overlap with the final run-up to the presidential and parliamentary poll on March 29.

The current crisis emerged even after government and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe declared the last farming season "the mother of all agricultural season" under which they had hoped to embarrass critics of the controversial land reform programme under which experienced white farmers were replaced by black farmers with a predominantly peasant farming background.

The Reserve Bank had tried to bolster the farmers' capacity through the farm mechanization programme under which farm equipment was disbursed to the new farmers.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP