The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) said in the report that the decline in food availability and accessibility in Zimbabwe was serious, adding that households were enduring an unusually high stress response to the shortage of food supplies.
Such responses would not be expected at this time of year, said the agencies that visited Zimbabwe last month at the invitation of President Robert Mugabe’s government to assess the country’s 2007/2008-season harvest.
The preliminary report, which was shown to ZimOnline on Tuesday, said: Production was affected by erratic rainfall patterns, timeliness and lack of inputs among other factors. Field visits suggest that communal farmers are likely to be the worst affected by the agricultural downturn.
A larger proportion of households have insufficient stocks to provide for their food in the coming year. WFP monitoring affirms, however, that cereal is generally unavailable.
The UN agencies are due to publish a full report on Zimbabwe next week which diplomatic sources said was going to reveal an even more precarious food supply situation in the country.
Giving a hint of what to expect in the report, an FAO economist, Kisan Gunjal, who was part of the delegation that visited Zimbabwe, told the media in Rome that cereal production would plummet again this year and food imports announced by Mugabe would do too little to make up the shortfall.
“Last year output was down 44 percent. This year we are expecting even further decreases in maize and cereal production,” said Gunjal.
Mugabe’s announced last month that his government had paid for 600 000 tonnes of maize from South Africa but Gunjal said this would not be enough to cover the shortfall with Zimbabwe expected to harvest a less than the 800 000 tonnes of maize recorded last season.
Maize is Zimbabwe’s main staple food with the country requiring more than two million tones of the grain per year.
Critics blame Zimbabwe’s food crisis directly on Mugabe’s haphazard fast-track land reform exercise that displaced established white commercial farmers and replaced them with either incompetent or inadequately funded black farmers.
Food production plunged by about 60 percent as a result while chaos in agriculture because of the often violent 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 companies have since the beginning of farm seizures in 2000 either closed completely or scaled down operations to below 30 percent of capacity, in a country where unemployment is more than 80 percent. Â
Some Western governments roundly condemned Mugabe’s presence at an ongoing UN food summit in Rome this week with Britain and Australia describing it as unfortunate and obscene that the Zimbabwean leader could be part of such a gathering when he was responsible for the collapse of his own country’s agriculture.
In an apparent show of displeasure at Mugabe’s presence, the Italian and UN hosts of the food summit omitted the Zimbabwean leader from the guest list of a ceremonial dinner for the leaders attending the meeting.
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was also not included on the list of guest to attend the dinner. – ZimOnline.
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