Zimbabwe: 5.8 million go hungry as food emergency deepens
Nearly half the population of Zimbabwe is facing hunger and needs food assistance as the country's food emergency deepens, a famine early warning group reported today.
Urgent action was required to help 5.8 million people in the country of 12.5 million who are now at risk from food shortages, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a food security monitoring group, said in its latest report.
The report sharply contradicts government assertions that the country has harvested more food – mainly of the corn staple – than it needs to feed the nation.
“Staple food availability is declining as market prices continue to rise,” Fewsnet said.
It said malnutrition and related diseases were expected to peak ahead of the next harvests.
In many urban and rural areas, families were forced to drastically reduce food consumption “or spend the whole day without having a meal at all” while programmes to help the elderly, the chronically ill, orphans and other vulnerable groups were grossly inadequate, the group said.
It echoed concerns earlier this week voiced by James Morris, head of the UN World Food Programme, over the refusal of international food aid by President Robert Mugabe’s government.
The country consumes about 1.8 million tons of corn meal a year, or 5,000 tons a day.
According to UN and independent crop estimates, Zimbabwe produced about half its food needs last year, but the government insists 2.4 million tons of food were harvested.
Morris said Zimbabwe produced less than 1 million tons in 2003 and described such a massive recovery in the following year as “staggering, if true”.
Fewsnet, a US-funded global research and food security organisation, listed the Zimbabwe food emergency second in Africa to Ethiopia, where 8.2 million people are at risk from hunger.
It said food shortages in Zimbabwe were worsened by inefficiency, transport shortages and “erratic” distribution of supplies at the state grain monopoly, the Grain Marketing Board.
The board’s is the sole buyer and seller of grain in the country.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change has accused the government of using the board to control food distribution as a political weapon, especially ahead of elections scheduled in March.
Agricultural production has collapsed in the five years since Mugabe ordered the seizure of about 5,000 white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to black Zimbabweans.
In what was once a regional breadbasket, some 5.5 million Zimbabweans received food handouts from international agencies in 2003.
But most food aid agreements were cancelled when the government last year declared they were no longer necessary.
Mugabe himself, in a television broadcast last May, defended his land reform policy as correcting unfair colonial-era land ownership and said the United Nations and international agencies were “foisting” food aid on the country to disparage the land redistribution program.
“We have enough. We are not hungry. We don’t want to choke on their food,” he said.
Zimbabwe is suffering its worst economic and political crisis since Mugabe led the nation to independence from Britain in 1980. Inflation is 132%, one of the highest in the world and an estimated 80% of the population are living in poverty. Acute shortage of hard currency, gasoline and medicines and other imports are routine.
