Zimbabwe faces food shortage

ZIMBABWE is bracing for another year of food insecurity, amid bleak expectations from both the main maize harvest in April and the coming winter wheat crop.

The hunger season peaked in March, when about 7 million people – more than half the population – relied on donated food.
An assessment of the national crop by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) will be published in the first half of June.
‘The harvest is going to be poor, we just don’t know how poor,’ WFP’s southern Africa spokesman, Richard Lee, told Irin News last week.
Feeding operations have been wound down, but about 600 000 vulnerable people would still receive assistance.
The joint assessment will determine food requirements for the once prosperous country in the coming year. FAO said in its latest ‘Crop Prospects and Food Situation’ newsletter that farmers had had to cope with ‘a long dry spell’, compounding the ‘shortages and high prices of key inputs such as fertiliser, seed, fuel, and tillage power [which] will result in another low cereal harvest this year.’
The agriculture ministry has forecast a maize harvest of 1.2 million metric tonnes, 600 000 tonnes below the national requirement. The 2008 maize harvest produced about 580 000 tonnes.
‘Nothing on the ground indicates that we are going to get as much [as 1,2 million tonnes]. Even the farming unions I have talked to tell me that we would be lucky to get 800 000 tonnes,’ Renson Gasela, former agriculture secretary of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and a farming specialist, told Irin.
The 2000 fast-track land reform programme, which redistributed more than 4 000 white commercial farms to landless blacks, was a watershed for Zimbabwean food production.
Lee said he did not expect the winter wheat crop to contribute much to food security, as ‘the irrigation systems are shot’.
‘Since the old government (President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF) embarked on the fast-track land redistribution programme, winter wheat farming has been deteriorating, and the trend is set to continue this year because the new farmers are again poorly prepared,’ Gasela said.
Although white commercial farmers tended to produce wheat and cash crops like tobacco because maize, the staple food, was subject to price controls, the collapse of commercial farming caused the disintegration of agricultural industries that supported maize production by small-scale farmers.
‘For optimal winter wheat yields, planting should take place from the beginning to the middle of May every year, but my observation is that most of the farmers have not even started tilling the land – that means that the farmers who decide to go ahead will produce hardly anything,’ Gasela sai
The dollarisation of the economy and the formation of a unity government on February 11 2009 have filled empty shelves and brought stock to retail outlets, including wheat seed, but Gasela said most farmers could not afford it, and fertiliser supplies were both erratic and prohibitively priced.
– Irin News