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Food relief for struggling Zim
25/07/2007 19:32 - (SA)
Harare - Zimbabwe is importing 200 000 tons of maize from Tanzania as it battles food shortages which critics largely blame on President Robert Mugabe's policies, state television said on Wednesday.
Critics say Mugabe plunged the southern African state into economic crisis by seizing productive white-owned commercial farms and giving them to inexperienced black farmers who have left the country needing to import food since 2000.
In March, Agriculture Minister Rugare Gumbo said Zimbabwe's food crisis would worsen this year because drought had damaged maize and other key crops.
But analysts and international aid groups say a combination of lack of rains and poor farming has over the years turned the country from the region's breadbasket to a net food importer.
The US Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service earlier this year forecast Zimbabwe's maize harvest at 850 000 tons in 2007, less than half the amount it needs to meet domestic consumption.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Food Programme said last month that more than four million Zimbabweans, about a third of the population, would need food aid this year.
On Wednesday, Zimbabwe television said the acting head of the government Grain Marketing Board (GMB) had said the agency was working hard to plug food shortages around the country and was expecting some maize imports from Tanzania.
"We are working hard all the time sourcing grain, locally and from outside, and right now we have got maize which will be coming in shortly from Tanzania, some 200 000 tons which we have imported," he said.
Food shortages are part of Zimbabwe's wider economic crisis, seen in the world's highest inflation rate of nearly 4 500%, unemployment above 80% and rising poverty.
But Mugabe, 83, who has been in power since independence from Britain, says Zimbabwe's economic crisis is due to sabotage by Western opponents seeking to oust him over his farm seizures.
- Reuters
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