Zimbabwe is facing a major food deficit of hundreds of thousands of tons, meaning that widespread hunger in South Africa's embattled northern neighbour is set to continue for some months, a respected international food monitoring agency has warned.
The Famine Early Warning System (Fews) says in its latest dispatch that Zimbabwe's cereal balance sheet shows that only 152 600 tons of maize had been imported by President Robert Mugabe's government by last month, leaving a deficit of 850 000 tons.
Fews said the lack of foreign currency to buy food remained a major problem in Zimbabwe. The organisation's remarks are in sharp contrast to repeated claims by Mugabe's government that the country has food stocks large enough to feed its people this year.
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The situation is now so dire that Mugabe has been reported as being dismayed with his Agriculture Minister Joseph Made. He has been accused of producing fictional figures about Zimbabwe's grain reserves only for the country to experience sudden shortfalls, forcing it to use handouts from the World Food Programme (WFP).
Made is expected to be dropped in a cabinet reshuffle after Mugabe returns from the Africa Union summit in Addis Ababa.
Despite the food crisis, the Zimbabwe government has been refusing to allow international agencies to carry out empirical food and crop assessment programmes on the ground. Fews has had to rely on satellite images for its assessments.
"It remains doubtful that the Zimbabwe (government) will be able to meet their import goals," it said.
The current higher prices of South African maize would make imports even more difficult, Fews said.
Despite experiencing one of the healthiest rainy seasons since 2005, Zimbabwe has failed to produce sufficient food. Mugabe has blamed this state of affairs on the black beneficiaries of farms seized from whites whom he has disparaged as "cellphone farmers" for their incompetence in farming.
Mugabe's government has often announced that it would bring back evicted white farmers to farm their land on a lease basis, but nothing concrete has come out of it. The Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU) says that only about a dozen farmers have been allocated land on a lease basis out of more than 300 who had applied. - Independent Foreign Service
- This article was originally published on page 4 of Daily News on January 31, 2007
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