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Food Security
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Extract from Weekly Media Update No. 2002-44
November 25th - December 1st 2002

Agriculture Minister Joseph Made's ultimate admission that Zimbabwe is indeed faced with a critical food shortage - after more than a year of repeated denials - not only exposed the blundering nature of government but also the complicity of the public media in covering-up the effects of government's agrarian reforms.

For months, since Made falsely assured the nation that government's wholesale fast track land reforms would be implemented without compromising the country's food security, the public media has been endorsing this lie.

Not once did they question the practicability of such a move, or indeed the rationality behind Made's dismissal of early warnings of serious maize shortages by agricultural experts, on the basis that he had done an aerial inspection of the country and was convinced Zimbabwe would have adequate grain.

Only the private media exposed these claims.

The minister's belated admission, reported in The Standard (1/12), that government "has failed to ensure food security for the famine-stricken nation", vindicates the private media's tenacity in uncovering these fairy tales.

In fact, the paper quoted Made as having told a parliamentary committee on agriculture that his ministry did not have "the purse to buy adequate maize supplies" for the nation. For example, he said his ministry was only able to import 22,000 tonnes of grain per month instead of the required 35 000 tonnes.

More importantly, the minister acknowledged the chaos surrounding government's land reforms by claiming that his ministry, which manages the reforms, had no idea of the amount of grain the newly resettled farmers were likely to produce this season.

The Standard quoted him as saying: "At the moment, we don't have the projected figures of what we have planted this season and this is a big problem.We only hope the new farmers will be able to produce enough grain to feed the country."

No other media reported on this profound revelation.

In contrast, ZTV (25/11, 8pm and radio stations, 26/11, 6am) painted a rosy picture of the food situation. It quoted the ministerial committee for food procurement and distribution chairman, Nicholas Goche as saying: "Government, using its own money and without donor aid, has imported 1,2 million tonnes of maize" adding "very soon maize will be available in the country".

There was no explanation about whether the maize was bought in bulk and if so for how long the tonnage would last. Instead, the station, just like the other public media and The Daily Mirror (25/11) blamed the shortages on sabotage by white farmers. For example, The Herald (27/11) blamed the wilting of "10 000 hectares of knee-high sugar cane" in Masvingo on white commercial farmers whom it accused of vandalizing irrigation equipment "to sabotage resettled farmers" although government "agreed to compensate them" for both the equipment and the sugar cane.

The Daily Mirror carried a similar report in which it quoted an unnamed farmer as attributing such vandalism to "this British mentality".

Both stories criminalized white commercial farmers at the expense of a fair and coherent analysis of the agricultural sector.

This professional negligence was also evident in The Herald (29/11), when the paper reported President Mugabe as urging newly resettled farmers "to till the land in preparation for the coming agricultural season" while in actual fact, the farming season is already underway.

The paper did not question why Mugabe would encourage the resettled farmers to use ox-drawn ploughs and not wait for government tractors to till their land.

Nonetheless, ZBC (Radio Zimbabwe, 28/11, 8pm; ZTV, 29/11, 8pm) seemed to offer an explanation when it quoted a local government official, Abiot Maronge as having said the government controlled District Development Fund (DDF) was "overwhelmed" as "the demand is too huge to the extent that it has not, up to now, managed to cover . even a quarter of the hectarage required to be tilled by DDF".

The report did not ascertain the underlying implications of DDF's failure to till enough hectarage, one month into the farming season. Such analysis appeared in the private media.

The Zimbabwe Independent (29/11) noted that the first rains had not "stirred resettled farmers into land preparation and planting, raising fears of another serious famine next year".

The paper's largely descriptive report also quoted land experts, as saying only about 40 percent of the government-acquired land would be put to productive use while the rest would be held for speculative purposes. Thus, it put the initial production estimate of yields at between 720,000 and 960,000 tonnes of maize as compared to the national requirement of about 1.8 million tonnes. The Financial Gazette (28/11) also carried a report by the United States Agency for International Development's Famine Early Warning System as predicting a 62 percent fall in wheat production in the 2002 season. It said wheat production would fall from the 2001 final harvest of 340,000 tonnes to 212,000 this year, forcing the country to import 200,000 tonnes to meet demand until the 2003 harvest season.

The public media, on the other hand, ignored this shortage aspect altogether, preferring instead to report on an ultimatum by the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) threatening all grain producers to either deliver their stocks within 14 days or face prosecution, The Herald (27/11) and ZBC (ZTV, 27/11, 7am; 3FM, 1pm).

In fact, the story was based on assumptions and not on statistical evidence. There was no clarity on how much wheat the GMB expected to be delivered, how much had been delivered and whether the total yields would be enough to feed the nation. The Herald story merely stated: "It remained unclear how much of the winter wheat crop had so far been delivered to the GMB. but the GMB has strong suspicions that farmers were holding onto grain, especially wheat which they will sell to private buyers at higher prices".

The paper and the Chronicle (29/11) also carried editorials that only welcomed the hiking of wheat prices from $40 000 to $70 000 a tonne without establishing whether the new prices were enough to cushion the farmers from high production costs.

While The Herald assumed that the new wheat price hike would force former white commercial farmers to "eat humble pie as black Zimbabweans will produce plenty of food on their new farms", The Daily Mirror of the same day quoted a leader of a black farmers organisation dismissing the price hike as "inadequate". However, the paper also failed to ask him to provide a clear breakdown on why he felt the new producer price was insufficient.

While the public media continued to gloss over Zimbabwe's food insufficiency, the private media warned its readers of increased hunger.

The Financial Gazette reported that a deal struck between government and the US to swap organic maize for genetically modified (GM) grain, to feed close to seven million Zimbabweans had collapsed because government did not have sufficient maize stocks.

The paper reported that an initial shipment of at least 17,000 tonnes of the GM maize, enough to feed 1.6 million hungry Zimbabweans, was lying idle at a warehouse in South Africa because government did not have a similar quantity to exchange it with.

More disturbing was the admission by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) that both government and foreign aid agencies were failing to cope with the mobilisation of food aid to feed the hungry because the food crisis in Zimbabwe was deteriorating rapidly, The Daily News (29/11). The paper quoted WFP as saying although they distributed 20,000 tonnes of food to two million Zimbabweans in October, they were still struggling to get sufficient resources for the critical months ahead.

Said WFP: "We are approaching the very worst period of the crisis, when 6.7 million Zimbabweans would need food aid and yet WFP does not even have the resources to meet our target of three million beneficiaries in November."

The Daily News (30/11) ran another WFP alert in which it quoted the donor agency's Deputy Country Director, Gawaher Atif as warning that the humanitarian crisis in the country had deteriorated to the point where "we are very close to famine".

The Financial Gazette reported hungry people of Insiza, in Matabeleland South, as imploring the WFP to resume its food relief distribution in the area to stave off starvation. The agency withdrew its services after suspected ZANU PF supporters allegedly confiscated some of its relief food during the run-up to a parliamentary by-election in the constituency.

Moreover, the paper cited the villagers as accusing ZANU PF of abandoning them after truckloads of maize, which the party allegedly used to lure support just before the by-election, "disappeared in a cloud of dust" following the party's victory.

In fact, the private Press also carried regular updates on the alleged politicization of food aid by ZANU PF as exemplified by The Daily News (28/11) as well as the continued forced evictions of white commercial farmers or the looting of their farms by chefs and state security agents, The Financial Gazette and Daily News (29/11).

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