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Zim may run out of food
11/11/2004 21:14 - (SA)
Harare - A Zimbabwe parliamentary committee has warned that the country will run out of food in the next four months, contradicting President Robert Mugabe's assertion that Zimbabwe has plenty of surplus food.
A committee of ruling party and opposition MPs said it found official forecasts of a record harvest of 2.4m tons of maize, the national staple food, difficult to believe.
In a report issued on Thursday, the committee said the country was likely to run out of maize before the next harvest in 2005.
It warned that misleading official statements of grain output would plunge the country into a serious crisis which would have an adverse impact on the national economy and national security.
The report is a major embarrassment to Mugabe, whose seizures of white-owned commercial farm land since 2000 are reported by independent agricultural organisations to have destroyed what was until then one of Africa's most-robust agricultural industries.
Ordered to stop distributing food
After two years of famine, the government announced in May that a bumper harvest of 2.4m tons would ensure not only ample food supplies but also a surplus for export.
It said there would be no imports of food this year.
The World Food Programme, the United Nations' famine relief arm, was ordered to stop distributing food supplies. Mugabe told the agency to take their food to countries that were hungry, asking: "Why do they want to choke us with their food?"
The committee said it failed to understand the huge gap between the forecast of 2.4m tons and the fact that the Grain Marketing Board, the state grain monopoly, only had 389 000 tons delivered to it by last month, well after the end of the 2003/'04 harvest.
It said it was uncomfortable with the GMB's assertion that farmers were retaining up to 75% of the crop.
The committee also reported that the government had signed contracts for 365 000 tons of maize to be imported from abroad, contrary to assertions by the government that there would be no imports.
In May, a United Nations crop assessment team was ordered home soon after it had started its work, and the government had repeatedly denounced the opposition-controlled council of the western city of Bulawayo for reporting 162 deaths by hunger there this year.
Only one crop growing
The likelihood of another year of famine was reinforced on Thursday by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
There is also growing alarm over the coming season.
A trip this week by a correspondent through 170km of what was formerly prime cropping country showed only one crop growing at a time when maize and tobacco plants should have been knee-high across hundreds of hectares.
- SAPA
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