Financial Gazette (Harare)
Sebastien Berger
27 September 2008
Harare — THE hills around Garanyemba, deep in Matabeleland South province, are littered with stunning rock formations, stark testaments to the power of nature.
But man cannot eat landscapes, and the people of Garanyemba -- a village whose name, by cruel irony, means "we live on beans" -- have little time for the beauty of their surroundings. Instead one thought consumes them -- food.
"Next time you come you will find us dead," said John Sithole, 45.
All he had to feed himself, his wife, and their seven children was a bunch of green vegetables and a single tomato, to be boiled up without even salt for seasoning.
The family's chickens have already gone to the pot, slaughtered after they stopped laying with no grain to eat.
"The problem we have is starvation," explained Sithole, an agricultural labourer, with the earnest dignity typical of impoverished Zimbabweans.
"What happens is we cook whenever we have got something. There was no food yesterday. The children have gone to look for wild fruit which is not there. I feel really bad when the children are crying," he said. "I can't do anything."
His sunken cheeks and ribs showing through the flesh of his chest were silent evidence of his suffering.
Across Zimbabwe, food is the highest priority issue for millions of people like Sithole, and addressing the crisis will be a key test of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai's ability to govern as prime minister after signing a power-sharing deal with President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF.
But President Mugabe is stonewalling over the allocation of ministries between the parties, and making clear he intends to retain as much authority as possible.
With food long used as a political weapon in the country, a senior Western diplomat predicted difficulties and obstructions from President Mugabe's loyalists.
"ZANU-PF knows the man who delivers food in this country is king," he said.
Vast swathes of Zimbabwe are experiencing food shortages, with the issue concentrated in the south of the country, much of which the World Food Programme classifies as "red zones", and the first, albeit unconfirmed, reports of deaths from starvation are beginning to emerge.
According to the organisation, more than two million Zimbabweans already need food aid out of an official population of just under 12 million. That number will rise to more than five million by the peak of the hunger season in January.
Total production of maize meal, the staple food, was estimated at a mere 575,000 tonnes this year, down by 28 percent on last year, with total cereal production standing at 840,000 tonnes, down 40 percent.
For a country which was once the regional breadbasket, exporting food to its neighbours, the figures are abysmally low.
"It was a very bad harvest this year," said Richard Lee, a WFP spokesman. "It was even worse than the poor harvest in 2007."
But while the rains have been poor for several years in a row, nature is by no means entirely to blame. There are similar climatic challenges in other countries in the region, but Zimbabwe has by far the highest percentage of people needing food aid.
This is man-made hunger, and not only because of President Mugabe's destruction of commercial agriculture by the invasions of white-owned land from 2000 onwards.
In Zimbabwe the government, through its Grain Marketing Board (GMB), is the sole purchaser and distributor of cereals, and Lee said that the buying price it set was too low.
"That proved to be a disincentive for farmers to strive to produce a surplus."
At the same time key inputs, such as seed, are in short supply, on top of the problems brought on by the shattering of the economy by President Mugabe's misrule.
On top of that, the government imposed a ban on fieldwork by aid agencies for two months, claiming they were campaigning for the opposition in the country's elections. This has severely delayed the distribution of food by non-governmental organisations, and even now some restrictions remain.
Lee declined to apportion blame. "This is a very complex situation," he said.
"Now the issue is not really to look back and apportion blame but rather to try to stabilise the current situation so this doesn't become a major crisis."
But others saw no need to be diplomatic. Paul Themba-Nyathi, a leading light in the smaller formation of the MDC and a former Member of Parliament for Gwanda, the area which includes Garanyemba, pointed out that the government has taken over as much of the production and distribution system as it can.
A 50kg bag of maize meal from the GMB costs 1,000, about US$2 (£1.08) at the cash rate and a pittance at the interbank transfer rate. But on the black market a bucket of flour -- a third of a bag -- costs 1,500.
To obtain cheap grain, local leaders have to apply to the GMB, with a list of beneficiaries.
In Themba-Nyathi's village, Nyandeni, a request filed in February was not fulfilled until July, and even then was 200 bags short.
"The reason for doing that is inspired by political considerations," said Themba-Nyathi.
"The need to use food as part of political patronage and a tool of political control would be higher in the order of things than voodoo economics. It's gone on far too long.
"We are faced with a humanitarian disaster. For partisan political expediency the government has tried to downplay the humanitarian crisis.
"If you admit you have a serious food shortage you are admitting that your land reform redistribution programme was a disaster, so they can't do that. They would rather play it down," he said.
President Mugabe and ZANU-PF resolutely refuse to accept any responsibility for Zimbabwe's suffering, instead blaming Western sanctions and businessmen supposedly plotting against the government even though the only measures the EU has in place are a visa ban and asset freeze on named individuals connected with the regime.
Such issues are simply irrelevant to people like Lakheli Nyathi, 62, who lives in Nyandeni, and has never known such shortages in her life. Her entire food supplies were down to a fraction of a bowlful of maize-meal, and half a small cup of sugar.
She has two cups of tea for breakfast -- no solids -- and spends the morning looking forward to 2pm, when she allows herself a small plate of sweet porridge. For dinner, she has nothing.
"What can I do?" she asked, her head in her hands. "I'm hungry."
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