Zimbabwe is to import 200 000 tonnes of the staple maize from Tanzania to avert widespread food shortages following a poor harvest, state television reported.
”We have got maize which will be coming in shortly again from Tanzania,” Samuel Muvuti, head of the state-run Grain Marketing Board, told Zimbabwe Television late on Tuesday.
”As soon as everything is put in place, stocks should be arriving into the country through the [Mozambican] port of Beira … for us to also cater for the southern part of the country.”
The report said efforts were under way to bring in another 200 000 tonnes from Malawi.
Last month, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations World Food Programme said in a joint report that more than four million Zimbabweans, a third of the population, were in need of food aid.
In March, Zimbabwe a former regional breadbasket declared the 2006/2007 farming season a drought year meaning the government would need to import hundreds of thousands of tonnes of maize.
President Robert Mugabe blames the perennial shortfall on drought and sanctions imposed on him and his ruling party elite following the country’s last presidential polls which the main opposition and Western observers charged were rigged to hand Mugabe victory.
But critics say the shortages were a direct result of controversial land reforms in which the government seized at least 4 000 farms from white commercial farmers for reallocation to landless Zimbabweans.
Beneficiaries of the land reforms often lacked the means and skills to farm, critics say, while others were holding on to fallow land for prestige. – Sapa-AFP