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HARARE, Zimbabwe,
February 9, 2005 (ENS): Once the breadbasket
of Southern Africa, Zimbabwe is sliding into famine
as crops fail and the ZANU PF government remains unwilling
to import grain to cover the production deficit. Millions
are in need of food aid, largely as a result of the
country's chaotic land reform program.
"Land preparation by resettled [black] farmers
is way behind schedule," admitted Local Government
Minister Ignatius Chombo, who is chairman of a government
food supply task force. Of tilled cropland, he said,
"We were targeting four million hectares, but only
900,000 hectares have been prepared."
A report just released by the Famine Early Warning
Systems Network, FEWS NET, the regional prediction service,
said 5.8 million Zimbabweans - half the total population
- are in need of food aid.
The problem stems from the disorganization of President
Robert Mugabe’s land reform program, in which
white commercial farmers have been driven from the land
since 2000 to be replaced by peasant subsistence farmers
and government ministers, army officers, judges and
top civil servants with no farming skills.
The majority of the new farmers have no ploughing equipment
and they have been sowing maize, the country’s
basic food crop, on untilled soils. In addition, because
the handful of highly skilled maize seed farmers have
been driven from their land into exile, this season’s
crop has been planted with untreated, low quality seed.
There have also been severe shortages of fertilizer
and other critical inputs.
"The biggest drawback over the past four years
we have seen here has been the lack of ploughing equipment,"
said Obediah Mupanganyama, a resettled farmer at Vairona,
a previously white-owned farm near Mazowe, 67 kilometres
north of Harare.
"Most farmers have been planting on unploughed
land which brings us to the problem you are looking
at. The weeds have overwhelmed the crops and we have
no machinery or chemicals to deal with them."
Mupanganyama said there were a few private tractors
for hire, and the cost of doing so, Z$350,000 (US$60),
was far beyond anything that any "new farmer"
could afford.
Black settlers at the previously white-owned Bally
Hooly Farm at Glendale, 83 km north of Harare and formerly
a rich wheat and cotton area before Mugabe’s land
invasion strategy was launched, said they had been unable
to till their soil and had scattered only untreated
maize seeds.
Elsewhere, hungry Zimbabweans are staving off starvation
by selling property or receiving money from relatives
among the three million or more of their countrymen
who have gone into exile. Many have sold cattle and
the tools they need to produce crops.
"There aren’t obviously starving people
walking the streets, but people are having to resort
to things like selling their last cow to buy food,"
a senior western diplomat told the Reuters news agency.
"The Independent," one of the country’s
few remaining private weekly newspapers, reported that
many people are now going without food for days, with
children fainting in schools and women miscarrying as
a result of malnutrition. Around the country, hungry
and irritated people have been standing in long queues
for hours to buy tiny rations of maize, and police have
had to calm unruly crowds.
Eddie Cross, economic spokesman of the opposition Movement
for Democratic Change, described the situation as frightening.
"Food shortages are causing extreme hardship across
the board and across the country," he said. "The
political implications are profound. I would hate to
run an election campaign amidst a food crisis for which
there is no solution."
By February, the maize crop throughout the country
is usually at knee-high level. But now many farmers
were still planting - far too late to secure a decent
crop because the summer rains are ending. The coming
harvest is likely to be one of the worst ever because
of poor planning, erratic rains and absence of low interest
loans.
The forecast by international donors and the political
opposition that the land reform program would be unworkable
and a recipe for disaster is turning out to be true.
While no accurate figures are available, farm experts
estimate that Zimbabwe’s agricultural production
has fallen by 70 percent in the last four years.
Just three years ago, Zimbabwe was still the breadbasket
of southern Africa, fully self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs,
with surpluses for export. Now it is a net food importer
and production of such key crops as maize, wheat, tobacco,
horticultural produce, soya and cotton has been slashed.
Last year, the ZANU PF government banned the import
of food by international humanitarian organizations.
It claimed a record 2.4 million metric tons of maize
and wheat had been harvested. But this was shot down
when parliament’s farm sub-committee said only
388,000 tons were produced, representing only one-sixth
of the country’s requirements.
Minister Chombo’s gloomy harvest prediction has
been contradicted by Agriculture Minister Joseph Made
who boasted that the new settlers would produce a record
grain harvest in the next few months of three million
metric tons.
Following a harvest of less than one million tons last
year, such a production total would be "a staggering
turnaround, if true," said James Morris, executive
director of the United Nation’s World Food Programme.
"If the projections are not correct, a great number
of people will be very much at risk. I don’t know
what the evidence is that things will be any better
than last year. The next 90 days are going to be crucial."
{Published in cooperation with the Institute for War
and Peace Reporting.}
Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2004. All
Rights Reserved.
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