Back to Index

Agriculture and food security
Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ)
Extracted from Weekly Media Update 2007-41
Monday October 15th - Sunday October 21st 2007
October 25, 2007

As in the previous week, the government media avoided inquiring about the adequacy of government's farming preparations and its contingency plans to ensure the country's food security. Almost all 52 stories they devoted to the topic (ZBC [24], government papers [28]) were piecemeal and barely went beyond official assurances that everything was under control. As a result, there was no attempt to test the relevance and adequacy of the type of machinery government had procured for farmers under its "mechanisation programme" to improve agricultural production or measure the quantity of inputs against the national requirement.

This superficial presentation was exemplified by the fact that apart from these media's generous coverage of the authorities' pronouncement on agriculture's imminent revival, there was hardly any contribution from alternative sources, or those from agro-industry, as shown in the government papers' sourcing pattern (Fig 3).

Fig 3: Voice distribution in official papers

The private media ignored Zimbabwe's agricultural preparations and focused instead on efforts to evict the few remaining white farmers, following a Chegutu magistrate's ruling that those still farming on government-targeted farms after the September 30 deadline to vacate the properties were in breach of the law. As a result, almost all their nine stories, two of which were carried in the private electronic media and seven in the private Press, were on the farm disturbances. The stories also assessed the implications of the continued farm seizures on production and conflicting official signals on the fate of the farmers.

The sourcing pattern of the private media, as exemplified by that of the private Press, is shown in Fig 4.

Fig 4: Voice distribution in private papers

Visit the MMPZ fact sheet

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP