The number of Zimbabweans needing food aid has increased to 7,5-million, nearly two-thirds of its population, according to a joint assessment by United Nations experts and Zimbabwean officials published on Sunday. It said there had been a remarkable increase in the number of people going hungry since September, when five million were considered in need of help.
International donors say they are scrambling to provide adequate supplies and accuse President Robert Mugabe’s government of refusing to admit that the policy of widespread land seizures has reduced food production.
Mugabe’s government is withholding food from opposition supporters, according to human rights groups — an observation confirmed by interviews with hungry rural people. There are 5-million in rural Zimbabwe who are dependent upon international food aid.
But the new study also shows that hunger is now widespread in the cities as well. It estimates that 2,5-million urban dwellers cannot get enough food.
Urban Zimbabweans are also struggling to cope with an unemployment rate of 70%. Many people are finding it difficult to feed their families because of food shortages and a 600% inflation rate.
”My pay is not enough to feed my children,” a factory worker said. ”Prices go up every week yet my pay stays the same. We can barely afford one meal a day. We haven’t tasted meat for a month.”
The price of Zimbabwe’s staple, maize meal, has soared.
Last year the state grain monopoly sold a 50kg bag of maize for Z$580. Now maize is generally available only from illegal traders who sell a 50kg bag for as much as Z$40 000 (R360).
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is struggling to provide enough food. According to Zimbabweans and human rights groups the government routinely withholds supplies to rural people in southern Matabeleland and many other areas which voted for the opposition in Mugabe’s disputed presidential election in 2002.
But the WFP has been criticised by Human Rights Watch for not taking a strong line against the political manipulation of food aid. WFP officials say they have corrected any problems.
”We categorically deny that the government interferes with our food distribution,” its spokesman Richard Lee said.
”We determine who should get our assistance by collaborating with the entire community and we never rely solely on a beneficiary list given to us by the government.”
WFP’s Zimbabwe representative, Kevin Farrell, has been widely criticised for failing to say that the land seizures are the primary cause of the growing food shortages.
”What we need are UN representatives who, without losing their diplomacy, are prepared to tell it like it is,” Iden Wetherell, editor of the Zimbabwe Independent, wrote in a recent column.
”Dancing around the problems in some misdirected concern for the sensitivity of their hosts is simply going to compound official complacency and discourage donors.”
Even when nearly two-thirds of Zimbabwe’s people are either hungry or dependent upon international aid, the government has forced through parliament a law to speed up land seizures and to take big sugar plantations and more farms.
It has already taken more than 90% of the country’s privately owned, mostly white-owned, farmland.
Now it is preparing to seize the rest, according to agricultural experts. – Guardian Unlimited Â