Zimbabwe faces famine if food aid stalled - Agency

Reuters via ZWNews ^ | July 24, 2002

[Clive]

Harare - Zimbabwe could have a famine on its hands by September if President Robert Mugabe's government delays a decision on whether to accept genetically modified food aid, a senior American aid official said Tuesday.

Roger Winter, an assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, said Zimbabwe had "expressed concerns" over genetically modified foods, limiting the amount of food the agency can bring in to help feed thousands of needy people. "We do not have other products ... in the volumes and within the time frames that are necessary to keep the food pipeline full," Winter told journalists in Harare.

"Famine and food-related deaths are not pretty. I argue that they are certain in this case if there is not an adequate food pipeline. You are going to start in all likelihood seeing serious impacts of at least a localized nature as soon as September," he said.

Zimbabwe, facing its worst political and economic crisis in 22 years of independence, is at the center of a devastating food shortage sweeping across southern Africa, including Malawi, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique.

In June the United States said it gave Zimbabwe 8,500 tons of maize but a further 10,000 tons was rejected because it did not have a certificate saying it had not been genetically modified. A senior agricultural official said it was standard government procedure.

Winter said other aid groups did not have the capacity to fill the gap that would be left by a rejection of U.S. food supplies, which he said accounted for 50 percent of the total international aid effort.

"The volumes that the U.S. is offering to supply cannot be made up for by any other country or group. As of right now, most traditional humanitarian donors for this kind of emergency have yet to step up to the plate," Winter said.

The United States, through the U.N. World Food Program, has to date distributed 42,930 tons of food aid mainly in the southern parts of the country mostly hit by shortages.

Aid agencies say 4 million to 6 million Zimbabweans need food aid this year, part of a wider food crisis threatening nearly 13 million people in the six southern African countries.

Once the bread basket of the southern African region, Zimbabwe now needs food aid after drought and the invasion of white-owned farms since February 2000 slashed staple maize output.

The government says the shortage of maize, the country's staple crop, is due solely to a drought that has hit small-scale black farmers who produce 70 percent of national output.

The government has also blamed dwindling food supplies on its political opponents and foreign interests, who it says want to punish Mugabe for seizing white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to landless blacks.

The government, following up the invasion of hundreds of white-owned farms in the past two years, has ordered nearly 3,000 farmers to stop farming and in June gave them a 45-day deadline which expires in mid-August to quit their farmhouses.

[Clive]

-