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Food Security and Agriculture
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2005-16
Monday May 2nd - Sunday May 8th 2005

THE government-controlled media also downplayed the country's precarious food situation and the chaos besetting the agricultural sector. This was reflected in almost all their 53 reports on the topic, 34 of which were carried by ZBH and 19 by the official papers. Most of the stories, as demonstrated by ZBH, heavily depended on government comments or individuals and organisations sympathetic to its policies such as the Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU). Consequently, ZBH's alternative and business voices largely advanced government's policies and shown in Fig 1.

Fig 1 Voice Distribution on ZBH

In fact, the levels to which ZBH sought to downplay agricultural problems were aptly illustrated by ZTV and Radio Zimbabwe (5/5, 8pm). While both reported that farmers had welcomed the hike in the maize producer price from $750 000 to $2 248 024 per tonne saying this would cushion farmers "against the high costs of production", they quoted Davison Mugabe of the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union actually expressing reservations about the increase.

Similarly, The Herald (6/5) overshadowed the farmers' reservations with their own qualified approval of the new price. Despite the fact that ZTV carried twelve isolated stories on problems in agriculture it failed to construe the problems as indicative of a crumbling industry. For example, although the station (7/5, 6pm) reported ruling party officials calling on farmers to stop destroying infrastructure on farms it did not divulge the extent of the damages or give a holistic picture of the situation on occupied properties. Earlier, ZTV (3/5 8pm, 4/5 6pm), Radio Zimbabwe (3/6 8pm) and Power FM (6/5

8pm) failed to clarify the "unclear circumstances" under which newly resettled farmers were evicted at Chabwino and Gensey Farm. The government Press ignored the evictions.

Also caught in the web of confusion surrounding the agricultural sector were Power FM (4/5 6pm and 5/5, 6pm) and ZTV (4/5 6pm, 8pm). They failed to reconcile farmers' contention that the winter wheat programme was behind schedule due to tillage and input problems with assertions by the District Development Fund that its preparations for the smooth tillage of the crop's winter farming were already in place. The Sunday Mail reported similar contradictions. But there were no such contradictions in the Independent, which revealed that "only an estimated 45% of between 65 000 and 85 000 hectares" that are normally put under winter wheat was "likely to be planted due to shortage of seed, fertilisers and low levels of water for irrigation".

The story was one of the 29 stories the private media carried exposing either the chaos in the agricultural sector or the country's precarious food situation, including revelations that government planned to lure back some of the former white commercial farmers in a bid to resuscitate agriculture.

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