The number of people facing serious food shortages in Zimbabwe is expected to grow to 4,1-million over the first quarter of next year, the Canadian ambassador to the African country said on Wednesday.
”This figure is expected to increase dramatically in the coming months due to a combination of factors, including poor harvests and the prevailing difficult economic situation,” Roxanne Dube said at a ceremony where Canada donated $3,3-million to the World Food Programme (WFP) to be used to feed starving Zimbabweans.
Dube, who said she has travelled around Zimbabwe over the past two years, said that the food situation in the crisis-hit country was dire.
”I have seen dry and bare fields, empty stores and abandoned farming equipment. It is a very saddening situation, especially when I hear from Zimbabweans how difficult it is for them to feed their families and make ends meet,” she said.
The WFP’s country director for Zimbabwe, Kevin Farrell, said that his organisation lacked $100-million needed to ward off famine that threatened a third of Zimbabwe’s population.
”Our shortfall is somewhere in the region of $100-million,” Farrell said on the occasion.
He said that food crisis in Zimbabwe was entering a ”significant phase” in which more than four million people will be ”food insecure” from the lean months of December to March.
Zimbabwe, has the ”greatest level of need of aid in the region”, he said.
Zimbabwe is in the throes of a chronic economic crisis with the world’s highest rate of inflation and four in every five people jobless. About 80% of the population live below the poverty threshold.
Hand to mouth
Meanwhile, one of Zimbabwe’s main bakeries has warned it has enough flour to last for just two more days, reports said on Wednesday.
Lobels Bread has already sent hundreds of workers on forced leave and has almost exhausted its reserve stock of flour, a company executive was quoted as saying.
”Flour availability has deteriorated and this has forced us to use our strategic stocks since May. Now we are only left with two days’ supply,” operations director Lemmy Chikomo told the government mouthpiece Herald daily.
”We have used all the 4 000 tonnes of flour that we had as reserve stock,” he said.
The Zimbabwe government is faced with a crippling wheat shortage.
At the weekend, Security Minister Didymus Mutasa admitted the country was living from hand to mouth as far as wheat stocks were concerned because it did not have enough hard currency to pay for the release of 36 000 tonnes of wheat stockpiled in neighbouring Mozambique. — Sapa-AFP, dpa