Zim imports maize as starvation looms

The South African Grain Information Services (SAGIS) disclosed in a report last week that Zimbabwe purchased the highest quantity of its Southern African neighbours maize exports, at a cost of about R7.2 million.

Zimbabwes agriculture minister, Joseph Made, this month said the government planned to stock up 500 000 tonnes of grain, an equivalent of the countrys strategic reserves during its heydays, to ensure food security.

But analysts have doubted the ministers statement, pointing out that for a government already reeling from severe budgetary constraints, it would be difficult to source an estimated US$80 million required for the cereal import bill, with the prevailing prices of white maize and wheat in South Africa pegged at R1207 and R2147 per ton respectively.

The United Nations World Food Programme has warned that the country faces a cereal deficit of up to 677 000 tonnes in the current season, between April 2009 and March 2010. The WFP also estimated that around 1.6 million people might need humanitarian assistance before the next harvest in April 2010, with the majority being rural folk.

A devastating dry spell has hit crops in communal smallholdings in the countryside, leaving small scale farmers, whose produce now forms the core of the countrys total agricultural output after commercial farms were seized, with nothing to harvest this season.

In Mberengwa West, inadequate rainfall has resulted in widespread crop failure, and villagers faced looming hunger. There wasnt much rainfall this season. Our crops have wilted in the sun and we now look forward to the government for help, Tavarasha Shoko, a peasant farmer from Nyororo village told The Zimbabwean.

The South African Weather Service (SAWS) last year forecasted that El Nino weather conditions developing in the Pacific Ocean would cause a drought across Southern Africa. A spate of renewed farm grabs by Zanu (PF) supporters has only made the situation worse. The Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) recently issued a statement, deploring the GNU for failing to stop a few extremists from openly threatening, physically attacking and illegally evicting commercial farmers.

It is an appalling state of affairs that, as a result of the virtual destruction of the commercial farming sector, our country has had to rely on food aid from the international donor community for almost a decade, said CFU President, Deon Theron.

Land reforms by the former regime of Robert Mugabe have been largely chaotic, without financial support or provision of precision farming skills to the new farmers. Agriculture used to be the centrepiece of Zimbabwes economy before the disorderly confiscation of prime farming land started in 2000, being the countrys largest foreign exchange earner, apart from creating immense job opportunities.