The food crisis in Zimbabwe is worsening, with a majority of the country’s districts having exhausted their food stocks, according to a United Nations report.
”According to reports from 58 districts in August 2003, food is becoming scarce, harvest stocks have been exhausted in a majority of districts and over half report a deteriorating food situation,” the report says.
The report comes a week after the UN’s food agency warned that only a quarter of its appeal for funds to feed millions of starving people in Southern Africa, most of them in Zimbabwe, had been met.
An estimated 5,5-million Zimbabweans will require emergency food aid by early next year, out of a regional total of 6,5-million.
According to the UN humanitarian situation report, families in several districts of Zimbabwe have taken to selling household goods to make ends meet, while others have resorted to eating wild fruit usually given to livestock.
There are also reports of critical water shortages in the drought-ravaged southern Matabeland province.
It says that in the Matabeland district of Gwanda ”80% of the families visited have lost their livestock through deaths related to lack of pastures, water scarcity or foot-and-mouth disease”.
According to the report the state-run Grain Marketing Board does not have enough food to feed people in the country’s most populous province of Manicaland, in eastern Zimbabwe.
”The province requires about 27 000 metric tonnes per month, but the Grain Marketing Board is expecting to receive about 10 500 metric tonnes for the entire year.”
The famine in Zimbabwe has been blamed on a combination of drought and what critics say is a poorly managed land reform programme launched by President Robert Mugabe, which has seen former white-owned commercial farms seized and handed over to new black farmers. — Sapa-AFP