Back to Index

This article participates on the following special index pages:

Listening for the trucks that will bring the food
IRIN News
August 28, 2008

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=80056

Hungry residents of a village in Masvingo Province, in southeastern Zimbabwe, have acquired an unusual skill: they have learnt to listen for trucks carrying food aid.

Elijah Banguza, 69, has become the village expert and can now identify vehicles by their sound, long before they appear on the road used by government and non-governmental organisation (NGOs) trucks.

The villagers are waiting for the grain the government promised them, but aid agency trucks have not come down the road since a ban was imposed on NGO operations in June. More than five million Zimbabweans will suffer food insecurity by March 2009, according to aid agencies, but many are already experiencing food shortages.

Banguza's skill saves villagers the distress of coming back empty-handed after pushing wheelbarrows, or driving donkeys or ox-drawn scotch-carts, for several kilometres to the business centre where maize used to be delivered for distribution.

"Now I can tell whether it is a haulage truck, a bus or passenger vehicle with the same ease with which politicians and local leaders have let us down," Banguza said. "Promised ... grain deliveries ... never materialise, week in and week out. Perhaps it is because the elections are over, we don't know."

In the run-up to the general elections in March, the Zimbabwean authorities assured people that government had imported 600,000 metric tonnes (mt) of maize from Malawi and Zambia, but mainly from South Africa.

But in the in the period before the second round of voting in the presidential ballot on 27 June, the government suspended all NGO activities, alleging political bias.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently urged the authorities to lift the ban and "avert a catastrophic humanitarian crisis", saying that "Due to their [NGOs] inability to operate, only 280,000 people of the 1.5 million in need of food assistance are being reached with distributions."

Little food to go around

Banguza's wife, Ruvimbo, lamented: "We are starving and no one seems to care about our plight. Our livestock will soon perish." She leant against an empty granary as she picked out kernels of maize from among the dried leaves in a half-empty reed basket. "This is all the grain we have."

She and her three granddaughters are lucky to have half a basket of grain to cook for supper; other families in the area have gone without meals for days, and any chance of the winter wheat harvest providing relief has also faded.

According to official estimates, about 8,900 hectares of winter wheat was planted - 13 percent of the area required to produce the more than 400,000mt the country needs to meet its annual requirement.

The government recently introduced a Basic Commodity Supply Side Intervention (BACOSSI) programme to cushion ordinary Zimbabweans from the escalating prices of basic household commodities, but this has done little to alleviate the villagers' plight.

"What we need is grain, not affordable hampers containing luxuries like sugar, cooking oil and toothpaste," Banguza complained. "We have survived on sadza [a thick maize-meal porridge] as a staple; who wants clean and healthy teeth when he is starving?"

Bartering livestock

Villagers in Masvingo tell how one of them sought to barter an ox for a bag of grain - a very uneven trade - to illustrate their dire situation. Experts say bartering might further impoverish the villagers because they will lack critical draught power to prepare their land in the coming planting season.

"It creates a huge dilemma for farmers," said local agricultural extension officer Jervas Rera. "They have to choose whether to barter their livestock to meet immediate needs in the form of grain, or face the prospect of failing to prepare their fields for lack of draught power in time for the onset of the wet season."

Malnutrition up

Food shortages have also increased malnutrition among pupils who benefited from supplementary feeding schemes funded and run by NGOs, mainly at schools and in poor communities.

When the twice-yearly national child health days, aimed at reaching the country's two million children aged under five with essential Vitamin A supplements and immunisation, kicked off in early August, the UN children's agency, UNICEF, expressed grave concern over the ongoing ban.

"We applaud and are committed to efforts such as the Child Health Campaign, but we cannot forget that a growing number of children are suffering daily because of the NGO ban," said UNICEF's Regional Director, Per Engebak.

"Every day that such an important lifeline of humanitarian aid for children remains cut off puts the children of this country at ever greater risk."

The week-long US$1 million campaign was supported by essential funding from the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), Canada's International Development Agency (CIDA) and UNICEF's National Committee of the Netherlands.

Zimbabwe is reeling under galloping inflation officially pegged at 11.27 million percent, although independent economists and bankers have put the rate as high as 22 million percent.

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