Augustino Zacarias, head of the United Nations Development Programme in the country, said on Wednesday that donors had so far pledged only $316m (191m, 222m) in humanitarian aid of the $718m sought by the UN.
He said that while Zimbabwe was not facing armed conflict, humanitarian threats such as food shortages and diseases including cholera posed a significant challenge.
The UN estimates that 2.8m adult Zimbabweans need food aid while 6m people have little or no access to safe water and sanitation. During the cholera outbreak in 2008-09 almost 100,000 people were infected with the disease, which killed 4,288.
Wednesdays UN report is the latest in a series of setbacks threatening the inclusive government established in February by Robert Mugabe, president, and Morgan Tsvangirai, prime minister. This week, the national airline, Air Zimbabwe said it would make 500 redundancies in a bid to stave off bankruptcy.
Patrick Chikumba, chief executive, said passenger numbers had collapsed from around 1m in the mid-1990s to only 300,000, while the state-owned airline had foreign debts of more than $30m. He said the airline needed to replace its ageing fleet of aircraft, some of which had a normal working life of 15 years but were still flying after 23 years in service.
Some government ministers have suggested that the airline be privatised, but the deeply divided coalition government is unlikely to make such a decision any time soon.
In a further public display of discord, Tendai Biti, finance minister, reiterated his repeated rejections of calls to revive the defunct Zimbabwe currency. Mr Biti said he was setting up a team of experts to advise on whether Zimbabwe should join the Rand Monetary Area, comprising South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland, in the process slapping down the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Gideon Gono, who this week called for the reintroduction of the Zimbabwe dollar backed by gold.
Mr Gono told a parliamentary committee that the country could use its own gold production to anchor the revived Zimbabwe dollar.
Striking government doctors demanding substantial pay increases have intensified the pressure on the government, which is unable to meet their demands. Teachers are also threatening to strike, while mine workers have declared a dispute with employers that has gone to arbitration. Mining accounts for nearly half of total exports, which fell 38 percent in the first half of 2009, underlining the necessity of avoiding any disruption to production.
Financial Times
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