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Agriculture
and food security
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Weekly Media Update 2006-29
Monday July 17th 2006
- Sunday July 24th 2006
THE government media also avoided openly
discussing the country’s precarious food security situation. For example,
all eight stories the official papers carried on agricultural productivity
dodged the subject.
Instead of holistically tracing the causes of the
decline in food production in the past five years, they treated
the problem as an emergent one. It was against this background that
these papers singled out "power cuts" and
"Quelea birds" as the major reasons why
this season’s winter wheat targets will be missed (The Herald 21/7).
Other problems, such as the delayed payments
of farmers by the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) and the serious shortages
of fuel and agricultural inputs were mentioned in passing. Neither
did any of the stories question government’s mismanagement of the
sector. Instead, they glossed over poor grain deliveries to the
GMB, which The Herald (17/7) supinely reported authorities as saying
had doubled. No verification of the claims was made.
All ZBH’s 52 stories on agricultural
productivity simply bombarded the public with routine
official calls to farmers to fully use their land, the threat of
Quelea birds and GMOs to the country’s food security, and mundane
reports on the traditional leaders’ conference in Kariba at which
government’s land reforms were praised. Notably, almost all these
stories simply regurgitated official statements, which lacked any
independent examination of the state of the country’s agricultural
sector.
In fact, the national public broadcaster’s
failure to frankly inform its audiences about the agricultural sector
resulted in ZTV (21/7, 6pm & 8pm) claiming that chicken farmers
were happy with land reforms while those quoted complained about
threats of eviction by unnamed individuals and a lack of security
of tenure.
No effort was made to identify the source
of the threats.
The government media’s passive coverage
of the farming sector was mirrored by their dependence on official
voices. See Fig 1.
Fig 1. Voice distribution on ZBH
| Govt |
Alternative |
Professional |
Business |
Farmer
|
Farmer
organisations |
Chiefs |
Foreign |
| 21 |
15 |
3 |
5 |
14 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
Notably, although the station quoted a significant number of alternative
voices, they were mostly used to reinforce official statements.
The Mirror stable’s coverage of
the topic reflected that of the government media.
However, the rest of the private media
treated the matter differently. They did not simply rely on official
positions to explain the state of the sector but balanced these
with their own investigations and alternative views.
For example, the Gazette revealed
that contrary to government’s upbeat projections on agricultural
productivity, the trend was actually downward. To support this it
cited statistics showing how harvests of such crops as wheat, grain
and tobacco have plummeted over the years. In fact, the paper’s
comment reported that the country needed "at least US$35million"
for maize imports alone this year.
MDC agriculture secretary Renson Gasela
concurred on Newzimbabwe.com (19/7).
As if to corroborate these reports,
Zim Online (20/7) and Zimdaily.com (21/7) published a
report by the Consortium for Southern Africa Food Security Emergency,
noting that most families in rural Zimbabwe would require food assistance
due to poor harvests and high levels of unemployment.
However, the private electronic media
compromised their slant by failing to seek official comment as reflected
in their narrow sourcing pattern.
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sheet
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