For the first time in at least 40 years, supplies of Coca-Cola dried up Wednesday in yet another sign of the crippling economic crisis in Zimbabwe, where people suffer acute bread shortages and farmers warn that worse is yet to come.
Harare agents for the United States Coca-Cola company said local production of the drink stopped earlier this month, but refused to give official reasons. Bar and café owners said they had been promised deliveries at the end of the month, but were told hard currency shortages had prevented licensed bottlers importing the secret concentrated syrup used to mix the popular soft drink.
One sports club in Harare on Wednesday sold imported canned Coke made under license from Malaysia for Zim$100 000 ($1), double the price of the locally bottled version.
It was the first Coke drought across the country for at least four decades, shop owners said. Throughout the seven-year guerrilla war that ended white rule and led to independence in 1980, Coca-Cola was available in rural stores in the heart of war zones.
Traditionally, it has been the country’s best-selling soft drink, and its absence underscored the nation’s worst economic crisis since independence.
Farmers’ groups on Wednesday predicted a further decline in wheat production, blaming acute shortages of fertilisers, fuel and electric power to run ageing irrigation equipment.
The three main farming organisations said in a joint statement that their members estimated planting about 45 000ha of irrigated winter wheat this year, down from 65 000ha last year and less than half the area needed to meet the nation’s demand for bread and other wheat-based foods.
Shortages of bread, a second staple after corn, also in short supply, power outages and scarcities of gasoline, fertiliser and other essential imports have become routine in the troubled Southern African nation.
The Zimbabwe Farmers Union, the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union and the once-dominant Commercial Farmers Union, now representing less than 400 white farmers still on their land, said neither the state power company nor the government’s fuel procurement company or private fertiliser distributors were able to guarantee supplies to critical food growers.
”There has been a continual decline in the production of wheat since 2001. This is a worrying issue. What the farmers envisage is that … 45 000ha can be handled in terms of inputs, equipment and chemicals,” the statement said.
Before the often violent seizures of 5 000 white-owned commercial farms began in 2000, Zimbabwe was self-sufficient in wheat and an exporter of surplus maize.
Poor harvests last year yielded about half the nation’s consumption of wheat and maize. The shortfall was supplemented by imports and food aid.
In January this year, at least three million Zimbabweans were receiving emergency food handouts.
The collapse of the agriculture-based economy since 2000 spurred record inflation to 780% last month, the highest rate in the world. – Sapa-AP