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Not
enough progress to do without aid
IRIN
News
December
09, 2010
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91334
An appeal for
US$415 million in humanitarian assistance to Zimbabwe in 2011 has
been made by the government and humanitarian organizations.
The humanitarian
situation has improved in the last two years, but there were still
"significant needs", the UN Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in the capital, Harare, where
the 2011 Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP) was launched.
"One in
every three children in Zimbabwe is chronically malnourished, and
malnutrition contributes to nearly 12,000 child deaths every year.
An estimated 1.7 million Zimbabweans will face severe food insecurity
during the peak hunger season from January to March 2011,"
OCHA said in a statement.
Urban farming
has increasingly become a feature in cities and reflects the fragile
nature of the country's food security, which reached its zenith
in March 2009 when nearly 7 million people - almost two-thirds of
the population - were receiving food assistance.
"Our hope
is that if we get enough rains this year and part of next year [2011],
then, through this urban agriculture that we practice, we may fend
for our families," said Sarudzayi Shoko, a domestic worker
who has planted maize, the staple food, on vacant land in Harare's
middle-class suburb of Belvedere.
"Unfortunately,
we are almost at the end of the year and very little rains have
fallen, and that is a cause for concern," Shoko told IRIN.
The national
food requirement is about 1.7 million tons, but only around 1.35
million tons was harvested in 2009/10.
The 1.8 million
hectares planted to maize in 2009/10 represented a 20 percent increase
from the previous year, but the greater amount of land under cultivation
was not mirrored in the harvest, which only increased seven percent
from the previous year.
In 2000, President
Robert Mugabe launched the fast-track land reform programme, which
redistributed more than 4,000 white commercial farms to landless
blacks, and set in motion a decade-long economic malaise from which
the country has struggled to recover.
"Whilst
there has been an improvement in agricultural production over the
last two seasons, the sector still faces many challenges and farmers
will require input support," OCHA noted.
"In addition,
although the scale of cholera has significantly reduced, localized
outbreaks continued to be experienced due to the poor state of the
health, and water sanitation and hygiene sectors. A third of rural
Zimbabweans still lack access to safe water," OCHA said.
Bureaucratic
blunders
A cholera epidemic
that began in August 2008 and lasted for a year before it was officially
declared at an end in July 2009 caused the deaths of more than 4,000
people and infected nearly 100,000 others.
Ignatius Chombo,
minister of local government, rural and urban planning, said food
production could also be affected by bureaucratic inefficiencies,
after it was "discovered" that rural farmers in the southwestern
provinces of Matabeleland North and Matabeleland South had failed
to collect farming inputs worth an estimated US$30 million, set
aside to benefit disadvantaged rural families.
Distribution
of the inputs, which include seed and fertilizer, is the responsibility
of the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), a parastatal organization.
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