Nearly five-million rural Zimbabweans will need food aid over the next year, the United Nations and international aid groups said on Thursday, despite claims by the government that no one in the country needs food relief.
At least 2,3-million rural Zimbabweans need food aid because they have not been able to grow enough food and cannot afford to buy what they need, the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee, a group of UN agencies and international aid groups, said in a report.
The rural hungry are just the latest group of Zimbabweans that the committee says needs food aid. At the end of last year, the committee predicted that 2,5-million urban Zimbabweans will need food aid in the final months of this year and in early 2005 because of deepening poverty in the southern African country’s towns and
cities.
Humanitarian officials said the two assessments mean a total of about five-million of Zimbabwe’s 12,5-million people will have to be given food over the next year.
UN crop forecasters estimate Zimbabwe will produce only half its food needs of about two-million tons of grain and cereals this year, despite the government’s insistence that there will be a bumper harvest with a surplus.
”These populations will remain food insecure if extensive food assistance is not provided during the current marketing season” before the harvests early next year, the report said.
But even if the food was available, most of the hungry could not afford to buy it.
Zimbabwe was once a regional breadbasket. But the often-violent seizure of thousands of white-owned farms for redistribution to black Zimbabweans, combined with erratic rains, have crippled the nation’s agriculture-based economy since 2000.
To avert a famine last year, The UN World Food Programme was feeding nearly six-million people at the height of the country’s lean season. The WFP is currently feeding about 650 000 a month. – Sapa-AP