The EU said in a statement issued on Thursday to mark World Food Day that the aid was part of a new emergency funding decision for food assistance in Africa aimed at saving lives and reliving suffering in one of the worst vulnerable regions.
Other African nations to benefit from the new funding are Sudan (€86 million), Ethiopia (€32.5 million) and Somalia (€27 million). The Palestinian Territories are also covered in the fund and will receive â‚¬40.36 million.
Once a regional breadbasket, Zimbabwe is in the grip of severe food shortages that Mugabe blames on poor weather and Western sanctions he says have hampered importation of fertilizers, seed, and other farming inputs.
However critics blame Zimbabwe’s troubles on repression and wrong polices by the veteran leader such as land reforms that displaced established white commercial farmers and replaced them with either incompetent or inadequately funded black farmers resulting in the country facing acute food shortages.
Chaos in agriculture because of farm seizures also hit hard Zimbabwe’s once impressive manufacturing sector that had depended on a robust farming sector for orders and inputs.
Most of Zimbabwe’s industries have since the beginning of farm seizures either scaled down operations to about 30 percent of capacity or shut down altogether, in a country where unemployment is more than 80 percent.
An unprecedented recession in the southern African country that is shown by the world’s highest inflation rate of 231 million percent has exacerbated the food crisis, with the government out of cash to import food.
At the same time, many families that would normally be able to buy their own food supplies are unable to do so because of an increasingly worthless currency.
– ZimOnline
Post published in: News