'This year there is nothing'
2008-10-10 14:44
Food is mounted on a donkey in Zimbabwe. The World Food Programme has found Zimbabweans reduced to eating wild fruits. (Richard Lee, WFP, AP)
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A dusty road leads to the village of Wedza, where veterans of Zimbabwe's liberation war eke out a meagre living on their farm cooperative, which after a promising start now brings only despair.
Johannesburg - The UN food aid agency found some rural Zimbabweans subsisting on wild fruits when it was able to reach the countryside after months of being blocked by the government, the agency said on Thursday as it appealed for more donations to fight hunger there.
As the humanitarian crisis deepened, Zimbabwe's politicians deadlocked in power sharing talks.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai called for former South African President Thabo Mbeki, a mediator in previous talks, to intervene, saying at a news conference in the Zimbabwean capital on Thursday that his party wanted a "fair power-sharing arrangement that allows us to deal with the current economic crisis and at the same time restore democratic freedoms in the country".
Zimbabwe's governing party had accused independent groups of supporting opposition activists and barred them from distributing aid for three months.
The ban was lifted in late August, but the groups, which had denied the accusations of political bias, were not able to resume work immediately for logistical reasons.
World Food Programme spokesperson Richard Lee accompanied workers handing out dried corn, vegetable oil and other aid in central Zimbabwe at the weekend in one of the first mass distributions since the ban was lifted.
A national crisis
Zimbabwe's economic collapse, with inflation of at least 231 million percent a year, has put seeds, fertiliser and farming equipment out of the reach of many. Aids has devastated the farming work force. Weather also has played a role, with too much rain in some areas and too little in others last year.
The combination of factors and years of food scarcity have put Zimbabwe in a category all its own in a region where other countries are poor and others have been buffeted by Aids and bad weather.
"Zimbabwe is the only one that is facing a national crisis," Lee said.
In a video Lee shot of the distribution, villagers were shown painstakingly picking kernels from the ground after just a handful of grain spilled, shaking off the dust and placing the food carefully in bags before hauling it home on their backs, in wheelbarrows, or on burros.
Lee said in an interview after returning to neighbouring South Africa that people told him they were experiencing one of the hungriest years they could remember.
"In previous years, we used to harvest a few bags of grain," Sabath Musiiwa, a 54-year-old caring for her TB-afflicted husband and four children, said in Lee's video. "But this year there is nothing."
Lee said the World Food Programme found Zimbabweans getting by on one meal a day, of corn meal porridge and a few vegetables for the lucky, but only wild fruits for others.
The UN estimates 45% of Zimbabwe's population, or 5.1 million people, will need food help by early 2009. The food agency said its stocks would run out in January - "at the very peak of the crisis" - if it did not get more help from donors. In a statement on Thursday the agency said it has received almost $175m so far this year for Zimbabwe, but needed $140m more to fund emergency operations through April.
The food agency's main donors for Zimbabwe include the United States and Britain, two of the sharpest critics of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
Mugabe blames his country's economic woes on Western sanctions, but his critics point to farm seizures he ordered in 2000. Most of the best farms that were seized went to Mugabe loyalists instead of the impoverished blacks he said he wanted to help, and the land lies idle, devastating the economy's agricultural base.
Power-sharing talks stalled
Zimbabwe's infrastructure also was deteriorating, leading to diseases like cholera. The Herald, a state-controlled Zimbabwe newspaper, reported on Thursday that because of a cholera outbreak in northern Zimbabwe, police were destroying fruit, vegetables, meat, fish and bread sold by illegal vendors and suspected of being the source of the outbreak.
As Zimbabweans suffer shortages of food, medicine, hard currency and cash, power-sharing negotiations between Mugabe and his main political rivals have been stalled in an argument over who gets which key Cabinet posts. Until the political impasse is broken, Zimbabwean leaders cannot turn their full attention to their growing humanitarian crisis.
Opposition leader Tsvangirai accused Mugabe's party of trying to cling to too many key ministries. Mugabe's party has accused the opposition of holding up agreement.
Mugabe's chief negotiator Patrick Chinamasa on Wednesday accused the opposition of negotiating in public and said that could endanger the talks.
But Tsvangirai said on Thursday: "We have reached a stage where talking to each other is getting us nowhere and the public has a right to know why."
- AP