Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge on Wednesday denied that Zimbabwe was snubbing a top UN official on a food assessment mission who was scheduled to meet with government ministers this week.
Mudenge told a press conference that the government could not meet with James Morris, the special UN envoy for humanitarian needs and head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), on Tuesday because it was holding its weekly cabinet meeting.
”We were in cabinet the whole day. If Morris had come he would have met nobody,” said Mudenge.
Morris, who is the agency’s executive director, is on a five-nation tour of the region to assess food security. He travelled to Malawi on Tuesday after the Zimbabwe leg of the trip was scrapped.
Aid agencies estimate that around five million Zimbabweans will require emergency food aid this year, but the Zimbabwe government has said it will not appeal for food aid because it expects a bumper harvest.
A crop and food assessment mission comprising UN and government officials was cancelled last month when the government recalled its field officers.
Press reports in Harare speculated that the Zimbabwe government was deliberately avoiding Morris, who has been to Zimbabwe at least twice in the last three years at the height of chronic food shortages.
”You all read big things into small things,” said Mudenge, adding that the government planned to reschedule the meeting with Morris at a later date.
The calling off of Morris’ visit occurred amid controversy over the government’s refusal to allow UN famine relief operations to continue for the third year in a row this year, despite widespread forecasts that crop output would again fall far below the volume needed to feed the country’s 12-million people.
”It’s a deliberate snub,” said a Western diplomat earlier in the week. ”Zimbabwe had agreed to the visit, and Morris was set down to see Mugabe. Late last week, they changed their minds.”
Last month, Mugabe said the UN was ”foisting” food on the country. ”We are not hungry,” he said. ”We don’t want to be choked.”
Since 2002, the United Nations has helped avert massive starvation as it delivered food to up to five million people at a time.
Zimbabwe was Africa’s second biggest food producer, after South Africa, until 2000 when the country’s agricultural industry began to collapse as a result of the illegal, violent state seizure of nearly all of the highly productive farmland owned by white farmers. – Sapa-DPA, Sapa-AFP