Zimbabwe’s supermarkets have run out of bread after bakers were forced to suspend their operations due to a critical shortage of wheat, shop owners said on Tuesday.
”I don’t know when we will have bread although we have been expecting deliveries since last week,” said Kassim Ngorima, a manager in a supermarket in Harare’s Avenues area.
”Maybe we will get bread next week or in two weeks. I now don’t know anymore.”
An Agence France-Presse correspondent witnessed workers arranging popcorn packets to fill empty bread shelves.
”There is no bread and I can’t even tell you when to check again,” said Taurai Kativhu, a manager in a supermarket in the capital.
”We are bringing our own food from home.”
A supermarket in the Borrowdale suburb had closed its own bakery and moved staff to other departments while one of the country’s main bakers, Lobels, sent 1 500 workers on forced leave after it scaled down operations.
Many Zimbabweans are turning to sweet potato, yam or the traditional thick cornmeal porridge, while some are bringing flour from shopping trips abroad and making their own bread.
Zimbabwe is facing critical shortages of wheat blamed by farmers on erratic power supplies. Others say the grain deficit is a result of poor farming by inexperienced beneficiaries of the government’s controversial land reforms.
A state weekly reported on Sunday that the country would harvest just over a third of its wheat requirements, blaming the deficit on power shortages.
In recent years Zimbabwe has resorted to importing the grain to augment the local yield amid a decline in production in agriculture, the former mainstay of the country’s economy.
Zimbabwe is in the throes of an economic crisis with the world’s highest rate of inflation and four out of five people jobless. About 80 % of the population lives below the poverty threshold.
At least 4,2-million people will be ”food insecure” from the lean months of December to March, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.
‘Scandalously’ low salaries
Meanwhile, Zimbabwean teachers have gone on strike to press demands for huge wage increases as the country battles with the fastest rising consumer prices in the world.
Critics say Mugabe has plunged the state deeper into economic crisis by ordering public institutions and private businesses to stop raising wages and prices without official authority in order to tame rampaging inflation.
On Tuesday, unions representing Zimbabwe’s primary and high school teachers said thousands of their members across the country had gone on strike on Monday over ”scandalously” low salaries — the latest demonstration of a wider economic crisis.
”Officially our strike began yesterday [Monday], but many teachers have not been teaching for a week or so and those turning up are doing so to supervise children at the playgrounds,” said an official with the Zimbabwe Teachers’ Association (Zimta).
”We are talking to the authorities over our grievances and our position is that we will not return to work until those issues are addressed,” he said.
The union — which represents about two thirds of Zimbabwe’s 90 000 teachers — wants the government to raise teachers’ salaries to at least Z$16,7-million a month, which consumer rights groups say is the minimum wage above the poverty datum line.
Teachers currently earn Z$3-million (US$100 at the official rate and US$6 at the black market rate).
Although the unions are refusing to be drawn into details of their wage negotiations, local media reports say the teachers have rejected the government’s offer to raise their pay to Z$7,9-million.
”We have been forced into this [strike] action because our employers are moving very slowly on the issue while many of our members can hardly afford fares to go to work on their monthly pay,” said the Zimta official, who declined to be named. — Sapa-AFP, Reuters