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Breakfast without bread for Zim kids
Marko Phiri
August 12, 2005

Breakfast for Zimbabwe’s millions of school children is not breakfast without bread, but with schools having closed last week for the third term, primary school children still find themselves waking up in the morning to join long queues for bread.

They wake up early in the morning to join long winding queues at a time when they should be enjoying their sleep. Bread shortages have resurfaced, and in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, school children can now be found in long winding queues waiting for the delivery vans.

Early this year government announced a wheat shortfall despite previous assurances there was enough harvest to feed the entire nation. In July, an association of bakers announced the country only had a month’s supply of wheat, and the shortages are already being felt in Bulawayo.

At a small kiosk in Tshabalala, one of the many high density townships which litter Bulawayo, a long queue forms before the bread van makes deliveries, and young school children and old grandmothers jostle to purchase their breakfast with the kiosk limiting purchases to only two loaves per customer.

The price of a loaf of bread here varies with some selling it for $7,000, while the government gazetted price is $4,500.

"We buy it from middlemen and sell it for $7,000," a kiosk operator told me this week. A "milk loaf" sells for $10,000 at some bakeries in town.

The World Food Programme estimates that at least 4 million people will need for aid this year amid growing government intransigence that it will not appeal for aid from anybody.

Robert Mugabe, in power for 25 years, is on record saying nobody will "foist food down our throats." Analysts say Zimbabwe’s agro-based economy suffered a huge knock more than five years ago when the government embarked on a controversial land reform programme which disrupted farming activities and prejudiced the country of much needed forex earnings.

According to independent economists here, the country needs US$250 million to import 1.2 million tonnes of maize to avert the looming starvation. That figure does not include wheat exports.

The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe (CCZ), a government consumer watchdog, calculates that, in April 2005 low-income urban households of six needed $2,347,000 each month to spend on basics which included bread, cooking oil, margarine and meat.

In May, the figure had gone up by 31 percent to $3,065,000. However, minimum wages here are pegged at $1,000,000, and by CCZ May calculations, this only covers 33 percent of the consumer basket. Only in December last year, the CCZ had estimated that a poor family of six needed Z$1,705,434 to last them a month on basic commodities. Food shortages continue despite government officials being quoted by state media threatening that they will not allow any NGOs to operate and do as they like as they were doing parallel work which compromised and undermined government efforts.

Meanwhile, for thousands of children here, the school holidays will be spent chasing bread. They will remember with poignancy the story of the gingerbread man.

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