The government on Monday denied Zimbabwe faces a hunger crisis and accused a United States-funded famine early warning unit of exaggerating food shortages to cause panic.
A report on Friday by the US-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a food security monitoring group, said 5,8-million people in the country of 12,5-million will need food aid to avert starvation before the next harvests in April.
Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said the United States was stepping up efforts to destabilise Zimbabwe ahead of parliamentary polls in March by causing alarm over food stocks.
He said 370 000 tonnes of grain was now being distributed by the state grain marketing board to needy groups around the country and another 400 000 tonnes were being held as strategic food reserves.
Some food — he called it carry-over stocks ordered in 2003 — was also being imported.
The government insists Zimbabwe produced a bumper harvest of 2,4-million tonnes of maize last year, much of it still being held in private rural granaries by growers.
The country consumes about 1,8-million tonnes of maize a year, or 5 000 tonnes a day.
Independent crop estimates have cast doubt over the government’s harvest figure, saying about one-million tonnes of food was produced last year.
Made said the famine unit report was part of a campaign by the United States to vilify the government’s land reform programme in which about 5 000 white-owned commercial farms were seized, often violently, for redistribution to blacks since 2000.
He described the programme as ”a resounding success” despite shortages of farm equipment, gasoline, seed and fertiliser.
The government has repeatedly accused Britain, the former colonial power, and the Unites States of campaigning for ”regime change” and the ouster of President Robert Mugabe.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month described Zimbabwe as one the world’s last ”outposts of tyranny”.
Zimbabwe is suffering its worst economic and political crisis since Mugabe led the nation to independence 1980. Inflation is 132%, one of the highest in the world and an estimated 80% of the population are living in poverty. Acute shortage of hard currency, gasoline and medicines and other imports are routine. – Sapa-AP