Harare | Tuesday
THOUSANDS of people living in southern Zimbabwe are facing starvation as critical food shortages loom, aid agencies and officials said this week.
The food crisis in southern Zimbabwe has been blamed on a variety of factors, including a devastating cyclone in early 2000, a January drought which destroyed this year’s maize crops, and onging disruptions to agricultural activity due to land invasions.
Since February 2000, government supporters have invaded hundreds of white-owned commercial farms to push for faster land reforms to redress colonial-era inequalities in ownership.
One hundred thousand children in the southern provinces of Midlands and Masvingo, are being given a supplementary meal a day by Care International, said a Care official.
Food shortages in Mberengwa, in the arid and drought-prone Matabeleland South province are critical, said Rugare Gumbo, the ruling Zanu-PF MP for Mberengwa East.
“We do have a desperate situation,” said Gumbo, but could not give exact figures of people needing assistance, saying officials in the area were still compiling them.
More than 180 000 people live in Mberengwa, according to the Central Statistical Office’s most recent census.
Meanwhile the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has alleged that food-for-work programmes carried out between January and April in Mberengwa had been reserved for ruling party card-carriers.
“In that area people are starving while Zanu-PF plays this kind of politics,” said Sekai Holland, the MDC candidate for Mberengwa East who lost to Zanu-PF’s Gumbo in general elections last year.
In Harare, the Famine Early Warning System (Fews) said in its latest report that food security in rural areas such as Mberengwa were “critical”.
Fews said the country’s stocks of grain were due to run out in two weeks’ time, just as rural households in southern and western Zimbabwe were expected to run out of grain supplies.
Last month Zimbabwean Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said the country was set to import 100 000 tons of maize from neighbouring South Africa in a bid to avert the looming food shortages.
He said the maize would be stored until April or May 2002, when he estimated the country’s maize stocks run out. – AFP
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