Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s government has stepped up its ”political interference” with food deliveries while up to half of all Zimbabweans have run out of food, a Zimbabwean survey published on Saturday said.
It was drafted by the Food Security Network (Fosenet), a local body linking 24 non-governmental organisations that monitor food availability in Zimbabwe’s 52 districts.
The survey said ”household stocks have fallen to zero or less than one month’s supply” and that in half of the 52 districts, ”everyone is now in need” of food aid.
At the same time, the survey said, ”there was an increase in reported political interference in relief” in the last month. It singled out ”procedural barriers, political bias and reduced supplies” as the most frequent obstacles to hungry people getting food.
While Zimbabwe’s famine — expected to threaten more than half the country’s population of 13-million people — has reached its most serious stage yet, the Fosenet report indicates that the situation is rapidly to become more desperate.
The Zimbabwean government blames the country’s drought for the shortage of food stocks but aid agencies, led by the United Nations, have said the famine is largely man-made.
They hold Mugabe responsible for the destruction of the country’s highly productive commercial farming industry because of his illegal seizures of white-owned farms and his unsound economic policies.
Aid agencies say there is evidence gathering that it is Zimbabwean government policy to force Zimbabweans, through starvation, to support the 78-year-old Mugabe.
The rigorous controls the government imposes on the import and distribution of maizemeal are seen by the agencies in Zimbabwe as strategies to withhold food from anyone suspected of supporting the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
Fosenet’s report said the availability of maizemeal in commercial outlets had also fallen — except for a brief period before local government elections. Supplies to shops were ”scarce,” and accessible only by standing in long queues, or through ”backdoor sales”.
It also said that in urban areas, even people with money had been unable to buy maizemeal.
Black market prices for maizemeal had reached up to 2 000 Zimbabwe dollars per kilogram, 67% more than the September price, Fosenet said, adding that black marketeers were making ”super profits.”
Earlier this week, a detailed report on official corruption in food relief by the Danish group Physicians for Human Rights, said figures in Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party dominate the black market.
Fosenet on Saturday also expressed concern about the ”latitude given to (rural) councillors in deciding beneficiaries” of relief from the official Grain Marketing Board (GMB).
Most GMB councillors are Zanu-PF members and the main supply of food in Zimbabwe comes through the board, whose depots across the country are controlled by ruling party militia.
Fosenet said deliveries to GMB depots had dropped, with half of the districts not getting any deliveries last month.
The GMB itself was selling at black market prices, the report said, adding that the ”upper ranges of GMB sales were 120% above the controlled price.”
While relief supplies through the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) had increased in October, the report said, the ”increase in relief does not seem to be of a scale to match this widening vulnerability” to hunger.
”The collapse in supply has produced huge reported burdens for the poorest,” it said. Children, the elderly, disabled and sick people were the worst hit, yet only one third of relief food was dedicated to children.
The UN says Mugabe has further curtailed the availability of food by banning private companies from importing grain and severely restricting charities from importing for their own relief programmes.
And despite Mugabe’s September promise to WFP head James Morris that he would allow genetically modified maize into the country, only minimal amounts have entered Zimbabwe. – Sapa