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Food security and agriculture
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2004-45
Monday November 7^th – Sunday November 14^th 2004

THE officially controlled media’s blind loyalty to government was again confirmed by the way they continued to downplay Zimbabwe’s food security concerns despite revelations by a Parliamentary committee exposing as fiction government’s claims that the country had produced more than 2.4 million tonnes of grain last season.

The government media have repeatedly flaunted the fairy tale claims of a bumper harvest to demonstrate that government’s controversial land reforms were a resounding success. It was no wonder therefore that when the findings of the parliamentary committee tasked with investigating government claims, confirmed earlier warnings of potential widespread food shortages in the country, these media became defensive.

For example, The Herald (12/11) passively let government officials trivialise the findings by dismissing them as having been shoddily compiled and "politicised".

The paper quoted Social Welfare Minister Paul Mangwana saying the findings were "shallow (and) based on wrong logic", adding: "it is simply supposed to convey the wrong political message".

However, the minister unwittingly acknowledged the country’s precarious food situation when he pointed out that government "was importing maize to build up its stocks". Typically, The Herald did not question this hypocrisy, particularly in light of Agriculture Minister Joseph Made and President Mugabe’s previous claims that the country’s yield would suffice.

Only the Independent (12/11) reminded its readers of this background in its story on the committee’s report, while SW Radio Africa (12/11) reported Renson Gasela, one of the members of the committee, dismissing the government claims as "all doctored and designed to show that there is enough food when there is none at all."

Interestingly, Radio Zimbabwe (9/11,1pm) reported Masvingo Governor Josiah Hungwe as having called on the authorities to distribute grain to the people in the province because they were facing starvation due to poor rains last season.

As if to add to Hungwe’s concern, SW Radio Africa (12/11) reported the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), a crop-monitoring agency, warning of even more widespread starvation in the country. It revealed that the 2,2 million people forecast earlier this year by the United Nations as requiring relief food would rise because food prices had more than doubled in the last five months well beyond the financial means of many Zimbabweans.

Meanwhile, the government media were reticent on the Parliamentary committee’s findings on wheat production, which the Independent revealed also exposed government’s projections of wheat yields as "inflated" because the country would experience a deficit of 62,000 tonnes.

The committee’s discoveries seemed to corroborate a Daily Mirror story (10/11) revealing that if the entire local wheat crop was harvested in time, the country would only reap 250,000 tonnes, which would still be far short of the national annual consumption of 450 000 tonnes.

However, the government media tried to underplay the potentially poor wheat harvest due to shortages of combine harvesters and transport to ferry the crop to the GMB (ZTV (11/11, 6pm) and Power FM (11/11, 8pm) by cushioning it with government announcements, ZTV (12/11, 8pm) and Power FM (13/11, 1pm), that it had released more than $190 billion for the purchase and transportation of wheat to GMB depots.

However, these media failed to question whether the financing was adequate or queried the wisdom of encouraging farmers to sell and transport their produce when some of them were unable to harvest it in the first place due to lack of harvesters.

The country’s crop production dilemma was given relevance by The Daily Mirror (10/11), which reported government as having failed to raise $250 billion required to support tobacco growers to produce the set target of 160 million kgs of the crop during the 2004/5 season.

The paper quoted a tobacco farmers’ representative saying even the $250 billion was not adequate to meet the target because growers needed about $3 trillion to realise such a yield.

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